Farewell the red soldiers

The April 15, 2006 issue of The Economist featured a small sidebar article of the same title as this post. It described a growing "problem" for police in China where increasing numbers of people have names that use highly obscure characters that are not supported in the Chinese language input software they use. The answer? Ban all such problematic characters.

But what really amused me is the opening sentence of the article which reads:

"Long gone are the days when Chinese parents often chose such names as Hongbing (Red Soldier), Aihua (Love China), or even Kangmei (Anti America) for their children."

Since all Chinese characters have meanings as standalone words, the oddity of having a name with obvious linguistic meaning is always overstated if name characters are translated literally. While some modern American names do have commonly used linguistic meaning (e.g. "Felicity" or "Summer"), most do not (e.g "Jane" or"Anne"). However, the idea that some real Chinese person might have such a clearly political (and dated) name strikes me as... hilarious.

Hi, Anti America, nice to meet you.