San Bai Qian was the universal introductory literary text for students, almost exclusively males from elite backgrounds.
[16] The study in Ontario, Canada, reviewed lists of South Asian and Chinese surnames and compared these to the Registered Persons Directory to assign specific ethnicities.
[16] The conclusion was that surname lists can identify cohorts with South Asian and Chinese origins with a high degree of accuracy.
Another study published in the Journal of Economic Behaviour and Organization by Elsevier[clarify] investigated the effects of China's two-child policy on its gender ratio.
The move towards a two-child policy which should suggest that the gender imbalance in China would improve substantially required closer examination.
An article published in Nature,[26] found that the birth rate per woman had dropped from 5.4 in 1971 to 1.8 in 2001,[27] by China's one-child policy enforced in 1979,[28] due to selective determination of the gender of a child.
The motivation for gender selection is partly welfare, in that a Chinese son is duty-bound to look after the needs of his parents, while a daughter's obligations transfer to her in-laws when she marries (Ball, 2009).
[29] Zhang's (2009) study aims to address this problem and suggests that Chinese families could revise traditional views on gender roles, starting with a proposed new surname system.
The researchers obtained surnames and administrative regions at a provincial level of all the Chinese officially registered in China's National Citizen Identity Information Centre (NCIC).
[31] The use of Chinese surnames not only helped this study to locate the local and global centers of China but also provided evidence of the historical mass migration to the Northeast (Alpha History, 2016).
The United States of America has a diverse spread of ethnic Chinese immigrants of different languages and cultural backgrounds.
Leung[34] states that most Chinese Americans can trace their ancestors' arrival back to the ninetieth and mid-twentieth centuries, from a shared Szeyap ancestral heritage.
Indeed, an article published in the Journal of Pragmatics states that Western-style English names are very commonly used by Chinese people of Hong Kong to communicate with Westerners and among themselves.
[36] The writer also notes that the Hoisan-wa[clarify] views misspelling their names by using pinyin Romanization would "skew Chinese American history" (Louie, 1998).