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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.
随着中国走出疫情阴霾，生活恢复正常，一名女子在微博上写的一条帖子，在这个炎炎夏日引起了不少人的共鸣。她表示，由于她丈夫不同意将孩子的姓改成她的姓，所以她正跟丈夫办理离婚手续。虽然有关此事的细节并不多，但无碍于其在网络上引起轰动，人们纷纷在想，中国女性的思想究竟已经进步了多少。根据《凤凰周刊》一份约4.7万人参与的网络民调，约有3分之2的受访者表示孩子的姓随父母双方均可以接受。
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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.
与大部分传统社会一样，中国父母长期以来更喜欢儿子，传宗接代的惯例仍然是这一观念的有力象征，（虽然女性总是能够在婚姻中保留自己的姓氏）。但随着社会习俗的迅速改变，越来越多的父母开始给孩子随母亲的姓，尤其是在富裕的城市地区。上个月发表在《人口经济学杂志》(Journal of Population Economics)上的一篇论文发现，在中国，如果母亲来自出生性别比例正常的地区，且她们年纪较轻、受过良好教育，那么她们的子女获得姓氏的可能性比平均水平更高。而这样的后代也比普通人更健康，受教育程度更高。2018年，上海每十个新生儿里就有一个是随母亲的姓氏。
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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.
一些年轻夫妇则采取双方都更能接受的方法，同时使用两个姓氏，有点像西方人创造的双管姓氏(尽管这些姓氏中只有一个为法律所承认)。根据2019年的一项调查，现在有超过110万中国人有这样的组合姓氏，比1990年增长了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.
政府对母系姓氏的支持最早可追溯到上世纪90年代中期。在独生子女政策中（2016年放宽），为了安慰生女儿的家长，政府鼓励他们给女儿取母亲的姓氏。为了进一步说服他们，官员们还深挖了古代母系社会的中国文献。
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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，这一切是否与家族血统更有关联，而非女权主义。澳大利亚天主教大学(Australian Catholic University)的齐晓英(音译)说，现在一个家庭可以有一个以上的孙辈，所以祖父们都劝他们的女儿把自己的姓氏留给其中一个孙辈，因为这样可以确保祖辈的血统延续。齐将这种做法成为“含蓄的父权制”。亲家们现在都在争论儿子的姓氏该用谁的。齐表示，母系姓氏这种做法变得越来越普及，并非是女权思想崛起，只是因为外祖父母一代有更多的财富可以传给下一代，如果他们比女婿的父母更富有的话尤其如此。
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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.”
齐女士表示，这种趋势起码表明，孩随父姓这种传统并非一成不变的必然。2017年，一项在中国东南部城市厦门的调查发现，二胎家庭中每100个二胎就有23个随母亲姓。南京一对姓安和慧的夫妇，给他们的孩子取名为“安子慧”和“慧子安”，均寓意“安和慧的后代”。慧女士表示：“家族血统和女权主义都与此无关，这只是一种表达我们爱的方式。”
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