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AS CHINA EMERGED from lockdown, a woman wrote a post on Weibo, a microblog, that has echoed through the long, hot summer. She was divorcing her husband, she said, because he would not allow her to change the surname of her child to her own. Details of the case were scant, but that did not stop it lighting up the internet, shining a new spotlight on the question of how far Chinese women have come. Phoenix Weekly, a magazine, launched an online poll that drew 47,000 respondents. Almost two-thirds said that a surname could come from either parent.
隨著中國走出疫情陰霾，生活恢復正常，一名女子在微博上寫的一條帖子，在這個炎炎夏日引起了不少人的共鳴。她表示，由於她丈夫不同意將孩子的姓改成她的姓，所以她正跟丈夫辦理離婚手續。雖然有關此事的細節並不多，但無礙於其在網絡上引起轟動，人們紛紛在想，中國女性的思想究竟已經進步了多少。根據《鳳凰週刊》一份約4.7萬人參與的網絡民調，約有3分之2的受訪者表示孩子的姓隨父母雙方均可以接受。
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As in most traditional societies, Chinese parents have long preferred sons, and the usual practice of handing down the father’s surname remains a powerful symbol of that (though women have always retained their surname at marriage). But with social mores changing rapidly, more parents have started to give babies the mother’s surname, especially in wealthy urban areas. A paper last month in the Journal of Population Economics found that Chinese children with young, educated mothers from areas with normal sex ratios at birth were more likely than average to be given her surname, and such offspring were healthier and better educated than average. Almost one in ten newborns in Shanghai were given their mother’s name in 2018.
與大部分傳統社會一樣，中國父母長期以來更喜歡兒子，傳宗接代的慣例仍然是這一觀念的有力象徵，（雖然女性總是能夠在婚姻中保留自己的姓氏）。但隨著社會習俗的迅速改變，越來越多的父母開始給孩子隨母親的姓，尤其是在富裕的城市地區。上個月發表在《人口經濟學雜誌》(Journal of Population Economics)上的一篇論文發現，在中國，如果母親來自出生性別比例正常的地區，且她們年紀較輕、受過良好教育，那麼她們的子女獲得姓氏的可能性比平均水平更高。而這樣的後代也比普通人更健康，受教育程度更高。2018年，上海每十個新生兒裡就有一個是隨母親的姓氏。
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Some young couples have compromised and use both surnames in combination, somewhat like Westerners creating double-barrelled surnames (though only one of those names can be legally recognised in China). According to a survey in 2019, the surnames of more than 1.1m Chinese people now form such a combination, a ten-fold increase on 1990.
一些年輕夫婦則採取雙方都更能接受的方法，同時使用兩個姓氏，有點像西方人創造的雙管姓氏(儘管這些姓氏中只有一個為法律所承認)。根據2019年的一項調查，現在有超過110萬中國人有這樣的組合姓氏，比1990年增長了10倍。
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Government support for matronymics has been around since the mid-1990s. Giving the mother’s surname to offspring was encouraged within the one-child policy (which was relaxed in 2016), to persuade people to be content with an only daughter. To win them over, officials dug up Chinese texts about ancient matrilineal societies.
政府對母系姓氏的支持最早可追溯到上世紀90年代中期。在獨生子女政策中（2016年放寬），為了安慰生女兒的家長，政府鼓勵他們給女兒取母親的姓氏。為了進一步說服他們，官員們還深挖了古代母系社會的中國文獻。
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Some wonder, however, whether all of this is more to do with genealogy than with feminism. Qi Xiaoying of the Australian Catholic University says that grandfathers are urging their daughters to give their surname to one of their grandchildren now that families can have more than one, because it assures the continuation of the grandparents’ line. Ms Qi calls this “veiled patriarchy”. In-laws now fight over whose name will go to the son. She says matronymics are more popular in Chinese cities not because of an assertion of women’s rights, but because a generation of maternal grandparents has more wealth to hand down, especially if they are richer than their son-in-law’s parents.
然而，有人就在想，這一切是否與家族血統更有關聯，而非女權主義。澳大利亞天主教大學(Australian Catholic University)的齊曉英(音譯)說，現在一個家庭可以有一個以上的孫輩，所以祖父們都勸他們的女兒把自己的姓氏留給其中一個孫輩，因為這樣可以確保祖輩的血統延續。齊將這種做法成為“含蓄的父權制”。親家們現在都在爭論兒子的姓氏該用誰的。齊表示，母系姓氏這種做法變得越來越普及，並非是女權思想崛起，只是因為外祖父母一代有更多的財富可以傳給下一代，如果他們比女婿的父母更富有的話尤其如此。
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At least the trend shows that a patronymic is not a foregone conclusion, says Ms Qi. A survey in 2017 in the south-eastern city of Xiamen found that 23% of second children in two-child families were given their mother’s surname. A couple in the city of Nanjing, surnamed An and Hui, called their children An Zihui and Hui Zi’an, both meaning “the offspring of An and Hui”. “Genealogy and feminism had nothing to do with it,” says Ms Hui. “It was just a way to show our love.”
齊女士表示，這種趨勢起碼錶明，孩隨父姓這種傳統並非一成不變的必然。2017年，一項在中國東南部城市廈門的調查發現，二胎家庭中每100個二胎就有23個隨母親姓。南京一對姓安和慧的夫婦，給他們的孩子取名為“安子慧”和“慧子安”，均寓意“安和慧的後代”。慧女士表示：“家族血統和女權主義都與此無關，這只是一種表達我們愛的方式。”
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