Names of China CN

Surnames in China are inherited, but drawn from a stock small enough that a few cover much of the population; the names that most distinguish China from the rest of the world are 张, 李 and 陈.

Written in Chinese, Uyghur, bo, Mongolian and 1 more.

Population
1.4B
Official registers
7
Name forms recorded
86K
BBuilt from 7 official registers, 85,508 name forms in our corpus, 20 cited works.

At least one official register, plus a written account of the naming system.

The account of the naming system rests on encyclopaedia and genealogy sources; it has not yet been checked against onomastic literature.

fewerlarger share
Where the names most characteristic of China are borne outside it — the same spelling, counted in our record corpus. Shares are of all bearers of those names anywhere, China included.

How names work in China

6 naming traditions are in use in China, listed in the order of the country's languages. They are separate systems, not variants of one, and each has its own page.

The most common names in China

Characteristic of China

Not the most common names — the most distinctive ones. A name appears here when China holds a larger share of its bearers than the world does, weighted by how much of the country's whole name distribution it accounts for.

汉伟丽杰静敏涛军艳文鹏超鑫宇婷勇华磊燕强红佳浩芳俊平丹娟明玲辉建晓雪海飞波慧斌霞凯洋玉娜倩云旭颖洁英亮萍峰瑞梅健莉欣博琳
Sized by how much of the difference between China's name distribution and the world's this name accounts for. Hover for its share here against its share worldwide.●

Over time

英玉秀兰红1945200421,309,061
ChineseNames: Chinese Name Database 1930-2008, 1945–2005 (8 years). The line is that register's own figure for each year — not a total across registers, which would count the same people twice. The publisher labels this series “flow”.

Up to five names at a time.

Scripts & spelling

Names in China are written in Han (61%) and Latin (39%), measured over the spellings our corpus records for this country.

李surname●
张surname●
Wangsurname●
Zhangsurname●
陈surname●
The best-attested names in China, in the spelling our records use there. Where a Latin spelling is also attested it is shown beneath — a spelling from the corpus, not a machine romanisation.

Countries whose names look alike

Measured as the overlap between each country's top 300 given-name forms, weighted by how common each is — the fuzzy-set approach of Lauc (2024), on a truncated inventory.

Registers & sources

Official registers

  • ChineseNames: Chinese Name Database 1930-20082005not a population count

    Beijing Meiming Science and Technology Company / NCIIC. Counts: not recorded. given and surname. 1,805 forms. 1945–2005. Licence: CC BY-NC-SA.

    What we know about this register

    1,806 surnames + top-1,000 given names from ~1.2B Han Chinese household-registered population (NCIIC 2008). top100name.year has rank+count per birth decade (1950-2000) by sex. Combined parquet → 4,005 rows (1,806 surname + 999 top1000-given national + 1,200 top100×decade×sex). Decade midpoint used as year (1950 → 1955). name_romanized null (CSV has no pinyin). data_note='nciic_2008', evidence='attested' for all rows.

    Last verified 2026-05-19.

  • MPS — 全国姓名报告 surname frequency (百家姓 top-101)2021not a population count

    Ministry of Public Security (公安部户政管理研究中心 MPS). Counts: not recorded. surname. 101 forms. 2021. Licence: Free (press release).

    What we know about this register

    BUILT 2026-06-27 via scripts/fetch_cn_mps_names.py -> normalized/CN/cn-mps-surnames.parquet (101 rows). MPS releases the 全国姓名报告 (National Name Report) annually via the 公安部户政管理研究中心 (Xinhua/CGTN/mps.gov.cn press releases). Top-101 百家姓 surname ordering from the report released January 2022 (data year 2021): ranks 1–20 carry national all-ages POPULATION COUNTS (王=101.5M, 李=100.9M, 张=95.4M, 刘=72.1M, 陈=63.3M, 杨=46.2M ...高=14.1M); ranks 21–101 are rank-only (count null). Top-5 王李张刘陈 = 30.8% of registered-household population (2020 report). Counts parsed from improvemandarin.com transcription of MPS Jan-2022 report; canonical mps.gov.cn landing TLS-blocks from outside CN (HTTP 521). Raw cache: raw/CN/mps/surnames_2022.json. evidence=count for counted rows; rank-only rows kept as ranked百家姓 (data_note mps_2022_report_rank_only).

    Last verified 2026-06-27.

  • MPS — 全国姓名报告 (National Name Report, newborn given names 2020+2021)2021not a population count

    Ministry of Public Security (公安部户政管理研究中心 MPS). Counts: not recorded. given. 10 forms. 2020–2021. Licence: Free (press release).

    What we know about this register

    BUILT 2026-06-27 via scripts/fetch_cn_mps_names.py -> normalized/CN/cn-mps-names.parquet (40 rows). MPS 全国姓名报告 newborn given-name rankings, two data years: 2021 report (8.873M newborns registered Jan1-Dec31 2021) top-10 M / top-10 F WITH per-name BIRTH COUNTS (M: 沐宸=22958, 浩宇=15722 ...; F: 若汐=18293, 一诺=16884 ...) parsed from improvemandarin.com transcription of the MPS 2021 report; and 2020 report (10.035M newborns, 5.29M M / 4.745M F) top-10 M / top-10 F rank-only — the MPS 2020 press release publishes ordering not per-name counts (M: 奕辰,宇轩,浩宇...; F: 一诺,依诺,欣怡...), parsed from Xinhua (xinhuanet.com/.../c_1127079509.htm) + 199it mirror. mps.gov.cn article bodies TLS-block from outside CN (HTTP 521). Raw cache: raw/CN/mps/given_names.json. evidence=count; 2021 rows carry counts (data_note newborns_2021), 2020 rows are rank-only (newborns_2020_rank_only). Pinyin romanizations auto-generated (pypinyin).

    Last verified 2026-06-27.

  • This page contains a list of author names and their respective publication details in 'Metal Science Journal', published2026not a population count

    www.ams.org.cn. Counts: not recorded. given. 25 forms. 2025–2026. Licence: unknown.

    What we know about this register

    Auto-discovered via Firecrawl. This page contains a list of author names and their respective publication details in 'Metal Science Journal', published in China.

    Last verified 2026-05-11.

  • The page presents a statistical report on the frequency of given names and surnames in China, published by the Public Se2023not a population count

    www.mps.gov.cn:9080. Counts: not recorded. given. 11 forms. 2023. Licence: unknown.

    What we know about this register

    Auto-discovered via Firecrawl. MPS 2019 name report (non-standard port 9080 URL); 10-row parquet has count=0 for all entries (rank-only: 张伟, 王伟, 李娜, 王芳...). Better source is cn-mps-2021 which has actual frequency counts from the same MPS series.

    Last verified 2026-05-12.

  • A detailed report from the Ministry of Public Security of China discussing popular baby names for boys and girls.2021not a population count

    improvemandarin.com. Counts: not recorded. given. 10 forms. 2021. Licence: unknown.

    What we know about this register

    Auto-discovered via Firecrawl. A detailed report from the Ministry of Public Security of China discussing popular baby names for boys and girls.

    Last verified 2026-05-11.

  • The Chairman's Bao provides a list of the most common first names in China.not a population count

    www.thechairmansbao.com. Counts: not recorded. given. 5 forms. Licence: unknown.

    What we know about this register

    Auto-discovered via Firecrawl. The Chairman's Bao provides a list of the most common first names in China.

    Last verified 2026-05-11.

Cited works

Behind this page's own account — its one-line answer, its explanation of why the rankings differ, and the notes on its registers. Each naming tradition cites its own sources on its page. Not yet checked against onomastic literature.

About this data

Official figures are reproduced from the register named beside them, at the year named beside them, and are never combined across registers. The "across all records" ranking counts records in our own corpus — historical registers, the diaspora, business and place records — and is not a population count. Bearer estimates are omitted where a name accounts for more than a quarter of a country's records, because the estimate is not defensible there. Names listed by reference works and licensed name dictionaries are cited as attesting a name; their figures are not published.

Data snapshot: 2026-09-12.

Questions

Is there one naming system in China?
No — 6 are described on this page (Chinese, Cantonese and Hong Kong, Hokkien and Min, Wu and Shanghainese, Zhuang, Uyghur), and they are separate systems rather than variants of one.

Cite this page: Mondonomo, “Names of China”, https://nelma.mondonomo.ai/names/CN (data snapshot 2026-09-12).