“A regulation will stipulate that the family names comes first before the given names when spelling using the Chinese phonetic alphabet, said Li Yuming, deputy director of the State Language Commission, according to the Beijing News on Monday.” [People’s Daily Online]
So, Li Yuming, rather than Yuming Li. My Chinese students have usually politely reversed the order of their names to conform to English speech community practice. But I can see that once there’s widespread contact, and new multilingual communities, it would be a battle.
It looks as though some elements in the Chinese government may be concerned about creeping English-ism, since the writer goes on to lament the report that some Shanghai universities have stopped testing science students on their Chinese language skills.
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We had some challenges when I was working with Indonesian colleagues from Lombok at Melbourne University a few years ago. Most Sasaks have only one name but the university insisted they had to have two, so we could pay them as research assistants. Sasak adopt various solutions, including adding a shortened form of the name, as in Yon Mahyuni. One of the university administrators commented that two of our colleagues had “the same name” Lalu Hasbullah and Lalu Dasmara, not realising that another solution to her Anglo-centric insistence was being used — lalu is the Sasak marker for married males of the lower level of the menak social class.