An argument in favor of uncommon names

Wanted!

Ma Chaojun (马超俊), a 33-year-old laborer, has been mistaken for the twenty-something Ma Chaojun (马超军) for the past two years. Name collisions are not uncommon, but the younger Ma is a criminal suspect, wanted for theft and homicide, and in this case, it’s the police doing the misidentification.

Here’s a chronology of the elder Ma’s ordeal, taken from Hubei news reports:

11 August, 2004: Detained by police in Hangzhou as he is changing trains. “How many motorcycles have you stolen,” they ask. After five hours in cuffs, the police let him go without telling him why they picked him up. Ma returns home rather than continue his journey.

11 November: Detained by police at the Ningbo train station. After a few hours, he is once again let go.

25 January, 2005: On his way to work, Ma is stopped by the police, who release him fairly quickly. When he reaches his company, however, his boss fires him for hurting the company’s reputation. He returns home, where his family begins to suspect that he is engaged in questionable activity.

17 February, 2006: At his local office of the Zaoyang City PSB to switch to a next-generation ID card, Ma learns from the police department that his problems are due to his personal information being listed on the national network as those of suspected thief and murderer Ma Chaojun (马超军). The PSB erases the innocent Ma’s name and photo from the network on the 20th. The next day, Ma is stopped at the Xiangfan train station when police check his ID and believe he is a wanted criminal. The Zaoyang PSB sends a representative, and Ma is let go the next day.

    The Zaoyang PSB issues Ma a certificate explaining the cause of the misunderstanding, vouching for his clean record, and noting that the information pertaining to him in the database had been wiped in February.

12 April: Ma is again stopped at the Xiangfan station. He shows his certificate to the police, who let him go.

Same day: When he reaches the Ningbo station, the police pick him up again and refuse to release him, believing the certificate is fake. He is held, cuffed, for three hours, until confirmation is obtained from the Zaoyang PSB.

Ma no longer dares to leave his hometown to find work, since getting stopped a seventh time remains a very real possibility.

The local PSB says that the problem stems from the way the national database operates. In March of this year, the public security bureau put into operation a new network, one in which Ma’s information had been totally erased. However, the old network, in which Ma is still listed as a murder suspect, is still available for reference use.

One solution mentioned in the reports is for Ma to be issued a new ID card. Making this a possibility is the fact that the ID he has now lists a mistaken birth year – 1971 instead of 1973 – which implies that if there were no mistake, he’d be out of luck, destined forever to be one of the usual suspects.