Legally getting a Chinese name

[Pengyou]

Has anyone recently considered this? I looked into it 8 years or so ago and it was a major headache at the time. I did some googling but most of the sites I found were not dated I probably have no real need to do this but I have lived here for so long I feel it somehow is appropriate.

[ChTTay]

does a chinese driving license use your Chinese name?

[fanglu]

I suspect as far as the Chinese government is concerned its the name on your passport that's your legal name. Unless you're from a country that puts characters on its passports, I'm thinking you're out of luck.

[roddy]

Driving licenses can be done. These come with a photo to refer to. If there wasn't a photo they might be less credible. But for anything important people are still going to want to see your passport, I think. Perhaps you can change your name at home to the pinyin of your chosen Chinese name?

[gato]

Good one.

[roddy]

'Course, you could always just get Chinese citizenship. I'm sure there's a clear and simple route.

[peterlkj]

It's really becoming a mess - my work permit has a totally made up Chinese name on it which is a "transliteration" of only my first name, and I use another Chinese name at work. Taiwanese at least can have their "English" name added as an official name on their passport, but when will European countries allow us to add characters to our passports??

[eion_padraig]

I get what the OP means. I had a rather random transliteration of my name on my foreign expert card many years ago, so it isn't like they were just using my name on my passport. I can see the desire to use a normal Chinese name on those kind of documents. I used a Chinese name with folks who couldn't speak English which helped me know it was someone I had interacted with before, especially when the dealings involved speaking on the phone.

Unfortunately, I don't know how you would go about it.

[ouyangjun]

I've got my Chinese name on my Chinese driver's license and my foreign work permit, other than that don't know.

[Lu]

Taiwanese at least can have their "English" name added as an official name on their passport,

As I understood, not really. You can get the transliteration of your Chinese name, but if you're Mary Johnson and get Taiwanese citizenship, your name in Roman letters will not be Mary Johnson but something along the lines of Ma-li Yue-han-hsun. Of course, as Taiwan's romanisation is a mess to begin with and half the people make up their own romanisation as they go along, I suppose you could try to argue that you simply opt to romanise 楊瑪麗 as Johnson Mary.

I know Chinese names are registered on diplomatic passes, they have a picture on them too and the original name (in the Roman alphabet at least, I don't know what they do with names in Russian or Arabic). I assume those are registered somewhere. But if someone would leave the country and come back in a different job under a different Chinese name, I don't know if they would still know it was the same person.

But why would you want to have an official Chinese name? It could only be used for things within China. If you, I don't know, buy a car in China under your Chinese name or get married with your Chinese name, how are you going to prove abroad that this car belongs to you and this spouse is your spouse?

[peterlkj]

In Taiwan they have the option to add "Also known as" and then whatever name they care to put, so my wife has her Chinese name in characters, her Chinese name in Taiwan's funky romanization and then under that her English name.

Is it a critical thing to have now? Maybe not but as China and the west get more integrated its certainly convenient to be able to merge your identity. The alternative of course is China gives up entirely on forcing us to have character names, but I don't see that happening any time soon.

[carlo]

Have you considered Hong Kong? AFAIK you can have both a Chinese and an English name on your HKID, and all HK residents gets an ID, regardless of nationality.

China also allows aliases (别名) — I know a Chinese citizen with an American father and a Chinese mother, and her Chinese passport has both her full Chinese name (characters and pinyin) and a note saying that she’s “also known as” her Western name (I saw this). But yes, maybe this would work for Chinese nationals/documents only.

[889]

This is really old, but did you succeed? My understanding is that you go to a notary, make and sign some sort of official declaration, then use that declaration to register your new name at various places.

[eion_padraig]

I use my Chinese name on Taobao deliveries. These days I don't have any official Chinese documents that don't use my actual passport name. It's possible the international school I work for has documents like my work permit with a Chinese name, but nothing I've ever seen. I haven't bothered with getting a driver's license yet.

 

Eion

[madizi]

When entering China, I always write my Chinese name on a form that you have to fill in at the airport. It's for safety reasons. All Chinese friends (and also police and security) know me by my Chinese name. If something happens to me, then they and police will find me quickly.

[suMMit]

My drivers license has my Chinese name on it and Tao Bao deliveries. When I registered my new apartment the other day, the police officer asked me if I had a Chinese name(in addition to the name on my passport)so I gave it to her. Its kind of funny that they want to some made up name, like if I was Chinese and said my English name is Johnson! Actually, when I applied for the DL, I thought it would have both names, but it turned out they only used the Chinese name.

[alantin]

I guess western names must be impossible for the average Chinese person to remember as theirs are for us.

The Chinese people, we usually have dealings with, all use western names and everyone knows them by those names. No one remembers their real names.

 

But it is interesting that they will use unofficial names on official documents..

[889]

It's not uncommon for Chinese to pretty much abandon their birth certificate name as they grow up and adopt a name more to their taste.

[Takeshi]

On 3/3/2013 at 10:09 AM, carlo said:

Have you considered Hong Kong? AFAIK you can have both a Chinese and an English name on your HKID, and all HK residents gets an ID, regardless of nationality.

 

Yes and no. I have a HKID with a Chinese name. How it works for foreigners is, the first time you get a HKID, you can ask them to input a Chinese name, and if you do so then, then you get it. If you did not give them a Chinese name the first time you got a HKID, you legally have no Chinese name, and you need to go through a legal name change to get one.

 

But the catch is, while the Chinese name is recognized in Hong Kong, the HKID is basically not recognized as a form of identification in the mainland, and you will have to use your passport for everything there.