More Chinese children are being given their mother’s surname

AS CHINA EMERGED from lockdown, a woman wrote a post on Weibo, a microblog, that has echoed through the long, hot summer. She was divorcing her husband, she said, because he would not allow her to change the surname of her child to her own. Details of the case were scant, but that did not stop it lighting up the internet, shining a new spotlight on the question of how far Chinese women have come. Phoenix Weekly, a magazine, launched an online poll that drew 47,000 respondents. Almost two-thirds said that a surname could come from either parent.

As in most traditional societies, Chinese parents have long preferred sons, and the usual practice of handing down the father’s surname remains a powerful symbol of that (though women have always retained their surname at marriage). But with social mores changing rapidly, more parents have started to give babies the mother’s surname, especially in wealthy urban areas. A paper last month in the Journal of Population Economics found that Chinese children with young, educated mothers from areas with normal sex ratios at birth were more likely than average to be given her surname, and such offspring were healthier and better educated than average. Almost one in ten newborns in Shanghai were given their mother’s name in 2018.

Some young...