Why 1.2 billion people share the same 100 surnames in China
(CNN)If you stop a random person on the street in China, there's a pretty good chance their surname would be either Wang, Li, Zhang, Liu or Chen.
That's because those are the five most common surnames in China -- shared by more than 433 million people, or 30% of the population, according to government figures.
With 1.37 billion citizens, China has the world's largest population, but has one of the smallest surname pools. Only about 6,000 surnames are in use, according to the Ministry of Public Security. And the vast majority of the population -- almost 86% -- share just 100 of those surnames.
To put that in perspective, the United States -- with less than a quarter of China's population -- reported 6.3 million surnames in its 2010 census. The majority of those names were only reported once.
There are a few reasons for this: China is less racially diverse than countries such as the US, where a wealth of minority groups increase surname diversity. It also has to do with language; you can't just add a random stroke to a Chinese character and create a new surname, the way you can add a letter to an English name.
But there's also another factor at play: technology.
China's digital revolution has transformed daily life, and many of these systems rely on a limited list of standardized Chinese characters.
That means people with rare characters in their names, which aren't compatible with existing computer systems, can get left behind -- pushing many to change their names for the sake of convenience, even if it means abandoning centuries of heritage and language.
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