> Top last names of authors are bascially top Chinese last names

Those aren't "last names".

Why is that? Does chinese have a smallest amount of different names than english?

Yes. Check this: https://www.yourchineseastrology.com/chinese-name/surnames/

Top 3 is 22% of population. Top 10 is 44% of population.

That seems... Suboptimal...

It almost seems worth the people with the most common names to permute them in some way to make them more unique - like 'double barreled' names in England.

Chinese names have more variation in their given names than their surnames. Given names that are homophones can be written using different characters, such that even if they sound the same, they look different in writing. See https://carlgene.com/blog/2011/11/most-common-%E5%90%8C%E9%9...

However, that written differentiation can be lost when a name is transliterated to English using the Roman alphabet... it's hard to encode 100,000+ characters into 26 letters and some accents.

Probably not a big deal when you're talking about famous people (Mao the dictator), but certainly there are a lot of ordinary Zhang Weis that could be confused for each other, especially if they use the same characters in Chinese too.

Speaking more generally, I believe the traditional Chinese culture emphasizes collective harmony over stand-out individualism, so the relative lack of individual uniqueness is probably not as big an issue. Fame is not something in and of itself worth seeking, or at least wasn't until recently -- the younger generations can seek individuality more than their ancestors. One Western author's take on it: https://jonlsullivan.com/2016/11/04/china-and-celebrity-poli...

But, back to the topic at hand, the problem of differentiating Chinese individuals is more a problem of how English speakers identify them than how they identify themselves to each other, in their native language and context. It's a weakness of transliteration and encoding.

I wonder how people in China use these identifiers? Perhaps by calling them 'last names' (even though they are first names), we embed a lot of assumptions that they are conceived of and used similarly.

Kurt Vonnegut has a novel called Slapstick (Lonesome No More) where the president of the US figures that a lot of societal problems are due to the loss of the extended family. His solution is to assign everyone a new middle name.

> 'Well,' I said, 'you might become Elmer Uranium-3 Grasso, say. Everybody with Uranium as a part of their middle name would be your cousin.'

Sounds silly, but it just might work, and I could actually see the CPC going ahead with something like this.

https://thesurrealist.co.uk/lonesome

It's unusual, you'd expect more names with more people. Maybe it's a cultural difference of how much we value individuality vs the collective?

Or maybe not. There are 38,000 James Smiths in the US, and 294,000 Zhang Weis in China, which is relatively close to parity as a percentage of population. Zhang Wei is about twice as common. I don't know if this is some statistical artifact, and if the US would trend in that direction with more people.

I think there is also a cultural change after the communist party took over the country. Modern Chinese names are very different from pre-ccp Chinese names. For example, Zhang Wei wouldn’t be a common name in old days.

See, they use Chinese names in Chinese, where a dozen of different names would be translated into "Zhang Wei" in English or other PIE based languages.

At least they don't have two presidents called George Bush，or 17 Brandon Stark (ref: https://awoiaf.westeros.org/index.php/Brandon_Stark_(disambi...)

Way way smaller set of names. Almost every Chinese person has one of a hundred surnames. Couple this with the fact that people often go by just their surname and things get confusing fast.

On the other hand Chinese given names are far more varied than those in English. I’ve never met two Chinese people with the same given name. Only about 300,000 people have the most common Chinese given name. In contrast, about 12 million people in the US are named John, but we’re a much smaller country than China.

About half the population have one of the ten most popular names. Not as severe as in Wales or South Korea though.