Ethnic name inconsistencies addressed

Authorities in the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region are aiming to clear up the inconsistencies of names of people from various ethnic groups on identity cards, social insurance and other government documents by the end of this year.

The government is also trying to develop a standardized system to input ethnic minority member's names on official documents, such as identity cards, social security, medical insurance and education records, Zhu Changjie, vice-chairman of the regional government, told a news conference recently.

The lack of standardization in official documents and registration systems has resulted in a number of problems for members of ethnic minorities, according to the regional government.

Some of the problems stem from a form of punctuation known as the middle dot, used to separate the Mandarin surnames and given names of the Uygur, Kazak and Tibetan people, among others.

"There are cases of some ethnic minority group members using banking services who find that the names registered on their bank accounts cannot match those on their IDs," the regional government said in a news statement.

There are cases of train and airline tickets being unable to show the full name of some ethnic people because of the larger number of Chinese characters needed.

Members of ethnic minorities sometimes encounter problems in using websites and smartphone apps, because some of these do not include the dot or long names in their system, Xu Taizhi, head of the population management section of the region's public security bureau, said in a previous interview.

Some websites and smartphone apps have limited the number of characters a customer can enter in the name field on forms, causing problems for people from certain ethnic groups, whose names can be up to 16 characters long, he said.

The problem has only become more significant in recent years as use of the internet and e-commerce took off in China, he added. 

Zhu said that authorities will try to improve the name inputting practices of different industries and government agencies to solve the inconsistencies in different systems.

The regional government will also standardize the inputting of names of newborns from the ethnic minority groups to ensure their names will be correctly registered in the government systems.

The authorities will also screen its systems to find those people who have registered the wrong name on their identity documents before notifying them to change their IDs, he said.