Goodbye Zihan and Zixuan: China's Newest Pupils Are Getting Names From the Classics
As China's new school year began on Tuesday, teachers rolling through first-grade registers reported that the once-ubiquitous Zihans and Zixuans have all but vanished, replaced by names lifted from classical poetry — the latest turn in how Chinese parents signal their ambitions.
The annual ritual of China's school roll call produced its verdict on naming fashion this week. As first-graders reported for the new semester, a teacher at the primary school affiliated with Henan University told the Henan-based outlet Dahe Daily that the names on her new roster no longer collided — the pile-ups of Zixuan, Zihan and Yinuo that dominated registers in recent years had fallen away sharply, replaced by names like Qingyue, Shuoyan and Xiuqi, chosen from classical Chinese literature and so distinctive that she remembered each child after one read-through. Her account, posted by Dahe Daily, was liked more than 8,000 times, and the phrase "the era of Zihan and Zixuan is over" spent the day high on Baidu's search board.
For outsiders, the story is a window into how tightly Chinese naming tracks the mood of the moment. The outgoing names were so common that they became shorthand: characters like han and xuan turned up so often in classrooms that media and parents alike began calling them "internet-celebrity characters," a vocabulary of fashion rather than meaning. A companion Dahe Daily post on this year's roster described the replacement wave in one line: Fusu, Zitong, Yongxi — names with a pedigree in poetry and philosophy, "small-audience but with depth."
The shift says something about the parents doing the naming. The generation now enrolling children came of age in the 2010s, when the Zihan wave crested; having grown up with names that sound like everyone else's, they are choosing against the crowd. Dahe Daily's reporting described parents steering toward "simple, elegant, classical-poetry styles," with class duplication rates dropping accordingly. Baidu's summary of the trend put it more bluntly: the era of Zihan and Zixuan has been "replaced" by the era of Fusu, Zitong and Yongxi.
There is a practical check on the creativity, though. The same report closed with a warning that has become standard in Chinese coverage of naming: parents chasing poetic, unusual names should avoid genuinely rare characters, because children whose names the household-registration system cannot type end up queuing at the public-security bureau to fix the record before they can get an ID.
"Every generation has its own romance," as Dahe Daily put it. The register for the class of 2026 has just been read out; the system's keyboard, for now, has mostly kept up.