本文选自《经济学人》8月29日刊文章。随着社会的发展，孩子随母姓越来越常见。最近的一项调查发现，如果母亲年轻且受过良好教育，他们的子女随母姓的可能性比平均水平高，而且这样的子女比平均水平更健康、受教育程度更高。很多人认为孩子随母姓是因为中国女权的崛起，其实并不然，相反这反映的是“含蓄的父权制”。孩子随谁姓，除了传统的父权制来决定外，现在越来越受祖父母和外祖父母家庭财富的影响，孩子随母姓，不是因为女权的崛起，而是外祖父母有更多的财富可以传给下一代。随母姓，将外祖父的姓氏传递下去，实际是“父权制”的间接体现。
选文精讲
More Chinese children are being given their mother’s surnameIt’s not just about feminismAS CHINA EMERGED from lockdown, a woman wrote a post on Weibo, a microblog, that has echoed through the long, hot summer. She was divorcing her husband, she said, because he would not allow her to change the surname of her child to her own. Details of the case were scant, but that did not stop it lighting up the internet, shining a new spotlight on the question of how far Chinese women have come. Phoenix Weekly, a magazine, launched an online poll that drew 47,000 respondents. Almost two-thirds said that a surname could come from either parent.
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随着中国摆脱封锁，一名女子在微博上发布的一条帖子在漫长炎热的夏季引发热议。她说，她正在和丈夫离婚，因为她的丈夫不允许她把孩子的姓改成自己的姓。这件事没有披露的太多细节，但这并未阻止它在互联网上引起轰动，也让人们聚焦中国女性的进步。《凤凰周刊》杂志发起了一项在线调查，有47000人接受调查，近三分之二的人说，姓氏可以来自父母中的任何一方。As in most traditional societies, Chinese parents have long preferred sons, and the usual practice of handing down the father’s surname remains a powerful symbol of that (though women have always retained their surname at marriage). But with social mores changing rapidly, more parents have started to give babies the mother’s surname, especially in wealthy urban areas. A paper last month in the Journal of Population Economics found that Chinese children with young, educated mothers from areas with normal sex ratios at birth were more likely than average to be given her surname, and such offspring were healthier and better educated than average. Almost one in ten newborns in Shanghai were given their mother’s name in 2018.
在大多数传统社会中，中国父母长期以来都更想要儿子，将父亲姓氏传递下去的惯例是这一点的有力象征(尽管女性在结婚时会保留自己的姓氏)。但随着社会习俗的迅速变化，越来越多的父母开始给孩子随母亲的姓，尤其是在富裕的城市。上个月发表在《人口经济学杂志》上的一篇论文发现，在中国，如果母亲年轻、受过良好教育，且来自出生性别比例正常的地区，他们的子女随母姓的可能性比平均水平更高，而且这样的子女比平均水平更健康、受教育程度更高。2018年，上海近十分之一的新生儿随母亲姓氏。Some young couples have compromised and use both surnames in combination, somewhat like Westerners creating double-barrelled surnames (though only one of those names can be legally recognised in China). According to a survey in 2019, the surnames of more than 1.1m Chinese people now form such a combination, a ten-fold increase on 1990.一些年轻夫妇使用了折中的办法，同时使用两个姓氏，有点像西方人创造的双管姓氏(尽管这两个姓氏中只有一个被法律承认)。根据2019年的一项调查，现在有超过110万中国人有这样的组合姓氏，比1990年增长了10倍。
