LEK Research Collective
Conference: Personal Names of Non-Han Persons and Ethnic Consciousness
”Personal Names of Non-Han Persons and Ethnic Consciousness in Modern and Contemporary Northeast China“
conference talk by Dr. Loretta Kim, China Studies, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA, 14 March 2019
This talk discusses findings from the compilation of a digital lexicon of names for non-Han people from the Ming dynasty to the present, focusing on naming patterns within families and analyzing some individual case studies. The greater significance of this research is two-fold: 1) to utilize a substantial body of data to trace how the construction of ethnic identities in the twentieth century by both the PRC and preceding regimes has affected how ethnic minorities choose to represent themselves, and 2) to promote the option of choosing non-Han names in the future since knowledge of such names is becoming rarer among ethnic minority persons in the PRC today.