Kiwis Loose face – again.

New Zealand is the puh financially, the country is fast going broke, but it does not seem to care. New Zealand desperately needs investor immigrants, but keep scaring them off with attacking them, insulting them, charging them with defamation if they dare to speak up against the supremacist existing establishment, and making them bankrupt, but most of all by incompetence and lack of understanding that the rest of the world is not just like New Zealand.

The latest row is over how officials in New Zealand, with their unchecked and unbridled powers, have attacked someone over his name usage.

Let us release ourselves from that for now, because it is before the courts, and look at Chinese names and birthdates.

Have you ever heard of Jiang Jieshi? Probably not, but he is best known in the west as Chiang Kai-shek, Chinas former nationalist leaser and Mao Zedong’s adversary. Both his names are quite legal in China, but how can that be. One person with two names.

In New Zealand we identify a person with the birth date, and the name is a precise western spelling. In China neither birth date nor name in western spelling has any legal or other significance.

Only Chinese writing characters have any legal meaning in China, quite naturally, but Chinese writing character give no clue to how to pronounce it. You can easily read Chinese writing without knowing a word in Chinese, using any language to pronounce the writing characters.

China has over 700 languages, three major languages, five major language groups, 56 official domestic nationalities, and 55 minorities, all with attached cultures. These languages are not dialects of the same language, as is a common misconception, but they are completely different languages, phonetically and grammatically.

So if you read the name in one language, it becomes different than if you read it another, and as the western writing is phonetic, it is written differently.

Chinese people are identified by their family registration, the so called Hukou, and the Chinese characters. A Hukou is a family registration where all members of one family are registered under one family head on one address, whatever they live there or not. Then, everyone must register at the local police station for “temporary residence” where they actually live.

It is very common in China to adopt additional names, or different names for a particular business venture, especially western names, but those have no significance at all legally, even if they sometimes can be written into a Chinese passport. It is easy to change your name in China, but you are then obliged to change your name everywhere, as there are no central register. That can reasonably easy be done when you are young, but become complicated as you get older to change everywhere you have used the old name.

There are two systems to determine age in China. The old system is that you are one year old the day you are born, you are living your first year. The other is the western system, you become one year old after 12 months. People can switch between the systems, and one young lady used that at the latest Olympics to legally become one year older so she could participate in the games.

As birthdates have no legal significance you can change your birth date in China. Chinese put quite some significance on the meaning of numbers, Eight means luck, safety and prosperity, while four means death. The word “death” and “four” are pronounced in a very similar way.

Chinese do not have names for months, but only call them by number, so April in month four, and that system is also used for days in the week. So if you are born the fourth of April 1944, you are born on the year of death the month and day of death. If you are born on a Thursday, which is day number four, you are born the day of death.

It lends itself to understand that Chinese may want to make changes sometimes.

New Zealand is becoming off limit for just about anyone in the world, after persistent and sustained attacks on any immigrant investor, the Britomart, the Young Nicks Head, Vince Siemer, and frequent education scandals, cover ups as the Fonterra disaster, and the extensive media censorship are all becoming well known across the world. The message to investors and skilled people is to go away and stay out. New Zealand can no longer be trusted. Even 42% of skilled Kiwis themselves have already left.

Opinion from Rick Harriss.
Harriss.rick@gmail.com