Adopting the wife's surname
In order to ensure the continuation of the family name, Chinese place great importance on sons. If it happens that the family line is interrupted, there are ways to save the situation, such as adopting a son-in-law to carry on the family name.
But it is quite difficult for a man to change his family name by marrying in to another household. Chinese believe that "a real man will never change his name no matter what." Most of those compelled to accept the wife's family name feel that they have betrayed and besmirched their ancestors in doing so.
Therefore, in Guangdong, Fujian, Taiwan, and other places, there is the custom of "sow-names," or "collecting the sow tax," which means that when a man and woman become betrothed, they agree that some of their sons will take the mother's ancestral name, like a tax in kind.
Recently, with the rise of feminism in Taiwan, some people have argued that it should not be legally mandatory for children to take the paternal moniker. Huang Yu-hsiu, a professor in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literature at National Taiwan University, once applied to adopt her mother's family name of Liu, though her application was refused.
In fact, male chauvinists need not see this idea as "revolutionary." At most, it marks the revival of an ancient custom. That's because Chinese in earliest times took the mother's clan appellation.
According to Yuan Chang-rue, in ancient times, when scattered settlements were coalescing into the feudal system, existing symbols of places of origin evolved into the written characters for family names. China was at that time a matrilineal society, and in fact the Chinese word for surname, hsing, [姓 姓 ] is a composite of the characters for "woman" [女 女] and "birth," [生 生] and can be literally explicated as "the child to whom a woman gave birth."
Moreover, historical records indicate that most of the earliest Chinese family names used the radical for "woman" in the character itself. Thus we can find names like Chi [姬 姬] (the surname of the imperial family of the Chou dynasty), Jiang [姜姜] (the ruling family of the kingdom of Chi), and Ying [嬴 贏] (the rulers of the kingdom of Chin). The ancient Chinese of this matrilineal society understood the idea of eugenics, and developed surnames to avoid marriage between persons of very close bloodlines.
Eventually, as China evolved into a patrilineal society, the old surnames changed. The feudal nobility of Chou took local place names to identify their clans; the use of these shih surnames (as distinct from the hsing or matrilineal family names) became a mark of the aristocracy, and it became a matter of pride to have a shih. Naturally, in adopting shih, clans gave up their hsing.
"By the Warring States period, there were enormous changes in society," states Chen Chieh-hsien, director of the Center for Chinese Studies at the United Daily News. "Confucius' teaching was spread to all without making any class distinctions, and many ordinary people rose to become high officials." Also, in the Chin and Han eras (from the 3rd century BC to the 2nd century AD), an imperial bureaucratic system was established, and the feudal system disintegrated. Shih no longer indicated high rank or power, and the distinction in status between the matrilineal hsing and the patrilineal shih was lost. Reflecting this, today the words hsing and shih, as well as the combined form hsing-shih, are essentially interchangeable in modern Chinese.
The uniting of two family names in wedlock is a great event for Chinese people.