Why is a Chinese name wrongly transliterated in Hanyu Pinyin?
A Chinese name is in three characters: surname and two characters for the given name.
The first character of the given name is a generation name shared by cousins of a generation, while the second character is the person’s unique identifier.
Both characters are chosen carefully by elders to reflect Chinese virtues and their hope for this new generation.
Unfortunately, under the Hanyu Pinyin standard (adopted in 1958 in China and later by the UN and ISO), the two-character given names now appear as one word, say Zhou Enlai. A discerning person may ask the question, why?
IT is to avoid confusing a person who only knows the Western-style 2-character names, i.e., a given name followed by the surname.
The older Wade-Giles system tried to help these (ignorant) persons by having a surname followed by the given name in a hyphen. So you have Chou En-lai.
Again, the discerning person may ask a 2nd question.
Why should a Chinese person’s three-character name be transliterated from Pinyin into the Latin alphabet to become a two-character name?
Writing it as Zhao Enlai erases the visible structure of “generation + personal name,” making it appear as though it’s just a two-syllable Western-style first name.
The Chinese three-character name is a very important cultural trait. It was emphasised by Han Su Yin in her autobiography, The Crippled Tree (hardcopy 1965, p. 33), and in her part-memoir, A Many-Splendoured Thing (1978, p. 106).
It is time to correct this wrong usage. People now are more educated than in 1958.
LWH, 31 August 2025