Baixing

Baixing ( ) or lao baixing ( ) is a traditional Chinese term, meaning "the people" or "commoners." The word "lao" ( ) is often added as a prefix before "baixing". A confederation of tribes living along the Yellow River were the ancestors of what later became the Han ethnic group in China. Several large tribes, including the Huangdi tribes ( ), Yandi tribes ( ), and the Yi tribes, formed an alliance that consisted of roughly 100 tribes. This alliance is the origin of the Baixing, or the "hundred surnames." Around 2,000 Han Chinese surnames are currently in use, but 19 of these surnames are used by about half of the Han Chinese people. About 87% of the population share 100 surnames.

Baixing ( ) or lao baixing ( ) is a traditional Chinese term, meaning "the people" or "commoners." The word "lao" ( ) is often added as a prefix before "baixing". A confederation of tribes living along the Yellow River were the ancestors of what later became the Han ethnic group in China. Several large tribes, including the Huangdi tribes ( ), Yandi tribes ( ), and the Yi tribes, formed an alliance that consisted of roughly 100 tribes. This alliance is the origin of the Baixing, or the "hundred surnames." Around 2,000 Han Chinese surnames are currently in use, but 19 of these surnames are used by about half of the Han Chinese people. About 87% of the population share 100 surnames.

Chinese family names

Chinese family names are patrilineal, meaning derived from father to children. After marriage, Chinese women typically retain their maiden name. Two distinct types of Chinese surnames existed in ancient China: Namely xing ( ) or ancestral clan names, and shi ( ) or branch lineage names. Later, the two terms began to be used interchangeably, and now xing refers to the surname, whereas shi may be used to refer to the clan name or maiden name. Historically, only Chinese men possessed xìng ( ), while Chinese women had shì ( ) and took on their husband's xìng after marriage.

Literary compilation

Hundred Family Surnames ( ), commonly known as Bai Jia Xing, is a classic Chinese text that lists Chinese surnames. The book was composed in the early Song dynasty. The text originally contained 411 surnames and was expanded to 504 over time. In the dynasties following the Song, the Three Character Classic, the Hundred Family Surnames, and Thousand Character Classic came to be known collectively as San Bai Qian (Three, Hundred, Thousand), from the first word in their titles. San Bai Qian was the universal introductory literary text for students, almost exclusively males from elite backgrounds.

Use of surnames to study Chinese ethnicity

Chinese surnames have been proposed to be used as an alternative method of identifying an individual ethnicity. Secondary data sources used by health research may not include information on race or ethnicity, and surnames are often used as a proxy when researching health care in ethnic populations. A study published by BioMed Central (BMC), an open-access publisher of reliable peer-reviewed journals, asserts that surname lists help to identify cohorts of ethnic minority patients, and it attempted to validate the lists to identify people of South Asian and Chinese origin. The study in Ontario, Canada, reviewed lists of South Asian and Chinese surnames and compared these to the Registered Persons Directory to assign specific ethnicities. The findings were validated against self-identified ethnicity through responses to the Canadian Community Health Survey. The conclusion was that surname lists can identify cohorts with South Asian and Chinese origins with a high degree of accuracy. A similar study in the Canadian Journal of Public Health on the validity of using surname to define Chinese ethnicity found that using surnames in existing health records and surname lists are reasonably sensitive and comparable. The American Journal of Epidemiology published a paper conducted from the same research in Ontario, Canada by Choi et al. (1993), using the Ontario all-cause mortality database from 1982–1989 to test if the surnames accurately identify individuals of Chinese ethnicity. The databases were randomly split into two and then compiled against varying cut-offs of positive likelihood ratios; surnames that did not meet the cut-off were then matched against the Book of Hundred Family Names (1973). The results proved reasonably positive, with high levels of sensitivity, positive predictive value, and positive likelihood ratio for both males and females. The research team did not find a universal set of Chinese ancestry names that can be applied in epidemiology studies. However, the authors proposed that every location may require ancestral names produced in its period to ensure accuracy and reliability.

References

Text derived from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=1349685120 under CC BY-SA 4.0; modifications have been made.