Written Chinese
Written Chinese () comprises Chinese characters used to represent the Chinese language. Chinese characters do not constitute an alphabet or a compact syllabary. Rather, the writing system is roughly logosyllabic; that is, a character generally represents one syllable of spoken Chinese and may be a word on its own or a part of a polysyllabic word. The characters themselves are often composed of parts that may represent physical objects, abstract notions, or pronunciation. Literacy requires the memorization of a great many characters: educated Chinese know about 4,000. The large number of Chinese characters has in part led to the adoption of Western alphabets as an auxiliary means of representing Chinese.
Chinese name
Although there are currently over 4,000 Chinese surnames (, "xìng") in use in China, the colloquial expression for the "Chinese people" is Bǎixìng (百姓) "Hundred Surnames", and a mere hundred surnames still make up over 85% of China's 1.3 billion citizens. In fact, just the top three—Wang (王), Li (), and Zhang (張)—cover more than 20% of the population. This homogeneity results from the great majority of Han family names having only one character, while the small number of compound surnames is mostly restricted to minority groups. This has not always been true in Chinese history: between the first and fifth centuries AD, a law against multiple-character personal names briefly popularized two-character surnames and a number of important figures like Zhuge Liang and Sima Qian possessed them.