Beijing, June 12: The world’s most populous nation is running out of names, the Chinese government announced yesterday in unveiling a review of one of its most cherished traditions.

The 100 surnames which according to popular folklore most Chinese share are failing to keep pace with the continuing rise in the number of their owners.

The excess of Wangs, Lis and Zhangs is leading to confusion as so many people share the same name. There are now 93,000 people called Wang Tao alone, the China Daily newspaper said in reporting the review by the ministry of public security, the police service, which handles identity registration.

The importance given to the 100 names is not strictly accurate since 15 per cent of the population have other less common ones. Nevertheless the official list is rote-learned by schoolchildren, and gives rise to the Chinese term for the common man — laobaixing, or “old hundred names”.

According to the most recent survey, Wang just beat out Li at the top of the list, with just over seven per cent each of the population.

That figure does not sound so huge, but with a total population of 1.3 billion and rising, it works out to 93 million Wangs and 92 million Lis, each on their own one and a half times the population of Britain.

The government is now considering lifting restrictions on what counts as a surname to allow a greater variety of charactersinese surname has to be used.

But most dramatic is the possibility of allowing babies to be registered with both parents’ surnames, becoming a first generation of double-barrelled children. This is already fashionable in Hong Kong.