Chinese Gov't Computer Problems May Force Chinese Citizens To Change Names
from the funny-how-that-works dept
I have to admit that I was among those who thought it was in incredibly poor taste and somewhat offensive when a Texas lawmaker recently suggested that Asian Americans with complex names should be required to change their names to reduce confusions and problems with matching up names to voting rolls. However, now it appears that the same thing is happening in China itself. According to the NY Times, the Chinese government is forcing people to change their names in an effort to modernize its own ID database. Apparently, the computer system being used can't handle some of the rarer Chinese characters, even though such characters are popular among some families as a way to give their children a distinct identity. It still seems in poor taste and somewhat offensive, but still somewhat fascinating to compare the two stories.![Hide This Hide this](https://ii.techdirt.com/s/t/i/topclose.png)
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Filed Under: china, identification, last names, texas, voting
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This isn't new
In Japan, one of the requirements of citizenship (rarely given out, mainly to long-term spouses) is to legally adopt a Japanese name.
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Define "can't handle"
I wonder where this falls on the Change-A-Configuration-Option / Can't-Do-It-Without-a-Complete-Redesign spectrum.
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Re: Define "can't handle"
It's kind of ridiculous that a technological limitation is having such a noticable impact on society/geneology/etc. why not build a database that CAN handle Chinese names, rather than forcing people to change their names to fit the database?
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Re: Re: Define "can't handle"
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Re: Define "can't handle"
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Re: Re: Define "can't handle"
I couldn't agree more. In fact, one of my sayings is "The customer is always right...except when they're not."
I'm not saying technology decisions should drive business decisions generally, but it is better for a programmer to say 'this is impossible. i cannot code it. your thinking is unclear' than it is to code some illogical mush to pacify their bosses.
Well, it may be easier, but I wouldn't say better. What's best is to be able to explain to the business user why what they're asking for isn't the best implementation and -- here's the hard part -- to have a business user who is smart enough to understand the explanation of why what they're asking for isn't the best implementation.
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Re: Re: Define "can't handle"
According to the NYT article, the Chinese computer system currently defines 32,252 characters out of around 55,000 total characters.
The unicode character set, on the other hand, already claims to contain 70,000 Chinese characters. Unicode is a well-known, well-recognised, easily-implemented format. Its only problem is that the data space required for each character is rather large (I believe each character can occupy three or four times the area of the comparable ASCII encoding commonly used for unaccented, English-only characters, though I'm not familiar with the intricate details of the format).
You can easily see Unicode working by opening the Windows program Character Map (Start->Programs->Accessories->System Tools in Windows Vista, and most others, as far as I recall), selecting a Unicode font, and scrolling down to the section containing CJK ideographs.
While Unicode is by no means perfect, for example, the specific complaints about chinese ideaographs are documented on the relevant wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CJK_Unified_Ideographs, given that the Chinese government wishes to restrict its citizens to an 8000-character set, which pushes it into the realm of 16-bit data encoding anyway, I really can't see one would choose to encode in such a limited character space, unless one wanted, for some reason, to implement a strange, illogical, internationally technically incompatible, downright *weird* storage and retrieval system, which would be a heck of a lot more work than using proven, internationally accepted systems.
So, again, while I agree with your sentiment as it applies to many technology cases, I don't see its relevance to this particular situation.
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Re: Re: Re: Define "can't handle"
That sounds interesting. Can you elaborate on this?
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What?!
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Can't happen
My point is that a lot of their names are more than just names. And the belief systems behind those names will make many people very reluctant to change them because they currently have lucky or fortuitous names.
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Re: Can't happen
So, you're saying that the Chinese people are fundamentally incapable of rising above superstition? I think there's a word for that attitude.
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Re: Re: Can't happen
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Standards Solve Everything?
In the Texas case, there was a legitimate issue that got blurred by Betty Brown's poorly considered suggestion. The case in point was a man whose name was transliterated differently -- for example, on the drivers license his name was (say) "Lu" but on the voter roll it was "Liu." I wouldn't suggest that people with Asian names change them to "Smith," but it might be best if they choose a single, consistent ("standard") transliteration and and spell out their names.
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Re: Standards Solve Everything?
One example would be "Jenny" Lang Ping.
I'm guessing the problem is that the poll workers see the legal name on one ID and their "common" name on another.
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Re:
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Re: Re:
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The Real Problem
A: Because the country has the website blocked that teaches you how.
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I think people should be able to have any name they want and then is no purely technological reason why that can't be.
to the person pointing out names are bad unique identifiers: No duh, that's why we created social security numbers, that is why no sane person creates a database that relies on the name field as having anything truly of value, there is always another number or field to uniquely identify the person.
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Re:
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Re: Writing Problem
That’s not insurmountable. Simply set up a central registry to which you submit an SVG representation of your new character, and get a new character ID assigned. All the computer systems can simply get updates from the registry, either periodically or on demand, when they see a character ID they don’t already recognize.
It’s not that different from, say, how the DNS registry for the Internet works.
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Re: Standards Solve Everything?
It's not that Unicode can't handle all of the characters, its that you would have to encode names with multiple encodings (Chinese-Traditional and Chinese-Simplified) to handle it.
To me that sounds like a fairly non-trivial problem - encoding each character with their character set.
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Fifteen bits ought to be enough for everyone...
The Times article mentions that.
The bureau’s computers, however, are programmed to read only 32,252 of the roughly 55,000 Chinese characters, according to a 2006 government report.
Are they using unicode here?
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Probably because there are over 55000 of them
Reading it it sounds like some people have been giving their kids "weird" names to make them "unique", like happens in the western world with people naming their kids things like Zowie, Dweezil, Fifi Trixibelle and Dandelion.
Except in chinese it means they are using non standard characters, and with so many to chose from it's creating a bit of a nightmare
Actually vagely remember a case a few months ago here in the west were someone wanted to name their kid something like "@" and the autorities stoped them, not only because the hassle it would create for the poor kid but also because of the problems it would create for collecting and storeing info on the kid
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Keyboards?
Think about it. The keyboard you are using at the moment is likely one of the common 100-odd key variants, or slightly fewer if you're using a reduced laptop keyboard; 60- or 80-key, say.
That's for an alphabet of 26 letters, with two written styles (upper and lower case), 10 digits and a handful of punctuation and special characters. And typing in accented characters on a standard keyboard is already a pain in the ass.
Now try designing that again, but this time for an EIGHT THOUSAND CHARACTER SET. And that's just the reduced character set that the story is complaining about.
Now try to imagine the utter, utter horror of designing something portable, practical and easy-to-manufacture which allows you to enter any one of FIFTY-FIVE THOUSAND CHARACTERS.
Now try training the average government official to use that monster.
Yeah.
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Re: Keyboards?
The good news is that they use the regular keyboards, which solves the easy-to-manufacture problem. The bad news is that you need to type multiple keystrokes for each character.
For linux it's called scim. For microsoft, it's called IME. XP allows you to install support for "East Asian languages" (look under Regional and Language Options).
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TAFKAP
Answer this, did the IRS reprogram their entire system so they could use 26 english characters and a 'symbol' or did they just list him as TAFKAP?
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Re: TAFKAP
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Western names
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And don't forget about little Bobby Tables... :-) http://xkcd.com/327/
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Numbers?
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It's unfortunate that computer systems cannot help to preserve cultures. Instead, we have an example of a culture making historic changes to bend to modern technologies and standards that originated outside of China. Just because a technology developed according to certain cultural ideas doesn't make it the "right" way or the "only" way. Unfortunately, it has become "the" way.
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http://english.eastday.com/eastday/englishedition/features/userobject1ai2358485.html
It's interesting that one one guy couldn't use "@" in his name.
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chinese hackers
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