China bans wierd baby names

China is planning to introduce new regulations on name registration because the government's computer database is unable to handle rare Chinese characters, state media reported today.

The current name database for new electronic identity cards to be issued to China's 1.3 billion population in 2008 does not contain thousands of uncommon characters currently used in names.

In China, there is a tradition of making up unique names for babies that carry the hopes of the parents for their child's future.

Chinese babies often get names from simple words such as "strength", "wisdom" and "bright" for boys and "serenity" and "beauty" for girls.

Chinese computer databases often contain fewer than 27,000 Chinese characters while the Kangxi Dictionary, the authority on the language, contains 50,000 characters.