The move to computerization in cultures with complex alphabets can introduce unwanted impacts on society.  Consider the Chinese language which has roughly 55,000 characters, although only 3,500 are in everyday use.  When the Public Security Bureau modernized its operations, managers, not surprisingly, decided that it would be easier to track its citizens if information was computerized rather than handwritten.  System designers compromised between the number of characters in everyday use and the census of all characters by allowing the system to use 32,352 unique characters.

While this decision did not have much impact on the operation of the system, or most of the information stored in the system, it did have a major impact on the recording of people’s names.  Family names were not a problem since only 100 surnames cover 85% of China’s 1.3 billion citizens.  (By comparison, it takes 70,000 surnames to cover 90% of Americans.)  As a result, many Chinese parents look to classical Chinese to find a first name for their children, in part to find a pleasing name and in part to help the child stand out in society.  Clearly, these classical names cannot be spelled using the 32,352 characters in the Public Security Bureau’s system.

Government officials have told individuals with these unique names that they must change their name so they can be listed in the database.  Further, they are working on a list of “approved” characters from which future parents must select children’s names.