Dotty dilemma for people with ethnic names
Print Edition
“Send me a dot, please!” Such prompts have plagued Murat Mamut. The 29-year-old belongs to one of the ethnic groups in China who need a dot between their Mandarin surnames and given names to distinguish them.
However, the inconsistent use of dots means minorities, including Tibetans and Uygurs, struggle for recognition with banking and e-commerce services.
“I feel as if I’ve wasted half my life dealing with this dot,” Murat said.
The dot in his name might be in the middle or lower middle register and the slight difference causes some real headaches. Bank tellers type out different dots on their computers.
“Everything is fine if it’s the first time you open a bank account, but you have difficulties in interbank transfers, paying for a mortgage, or accessing Alipay,” Murat said.
He has written to the authorities and posted comments on social platforms like Weibo, but to no avail.
When working in Shanghai four years ago, Murat spent a month standardizing all the dots in his bankcard names to the “middle dot.”
“I’ve been to all the big banks in Shanghai. They just didn’t understand what I was talking about,” he said.
Uygur Abulat Ruzetohut, a student at Beijing’s Capital Normal University, said he has studied web punctuation and found four different forms.
“I’ve no idea which bank uses which form until I try them out,” he said.
Abulat said he couldn’t get a credit card because he has a card from a bank in Yinchuan that uses a different dot.
He now lives in Xinjiang, and once a month, he makes a repayment on his car loan, but his bank card is not recognized by China UnionPay.
Lazat said she receives dozens of parcels via express delivery every day in college. She is an online agent for her friends because she has no dot in her name.
“Shopping for overseas goods requires a lot of procedures that need verifying with your identity card. That’s impossible for classmates who have a dot in their names,” the young Kazakh said.
Fellow Kazakh Erken Jakul has run into trouble when booking flights. He found it impossible to input a dot as the default dots were all forbidden character codes so he had to omit the dot.
The tiny dot can bring bigger problems. Nefesa Nihemet, a Uygur lawyer in Shanghai, said she daren’t link her graduate and postgraduate degrees with her ID, fearing they will be judged as “fake” as the dots are different.
Many people in regions inhabited by ethnic groups still hold old IDs that have the dots in the lower middle position, while newer IDs put the dot in the middle, she said.
If they update their IDs, security cards and medical cards must also be altered.
The most effective way is to issue a standard for banking and security departments and have other industries use it, said Professor Cui Yanhu, of Xinjiang Normal University.
In 1995, China’s Standardization Administration issued an internal code specification for the middle dot, he says. This code can be typed out by any input method editor, and is supported by China’s banks, public security and border agencies, and railway systems.
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