Registered and verified "real-name" accounts could be optional, visibly marked in posts. Readers could then learn to ignore others, if they so choose.

It would still leave the possibility to contribute anonymously for more secretive people.

We started with a foreign name, which can be easily and harmlesly pronounced in Chinese, and therefore transliterated into Chinese written language.

Our son now has this Chinese name, which can be pronounced (more or less) according to foreign pronounciation. Observing however, that this particular foreign name can be pronounced in two different ways abroad.

However, when we got his Chinese passport, his Chinese name was transliterated into Pinyin and then it no longer matched the expected English form of name.

If we in future get him foreign passport, he will have my family name on it, and the given name is initially required to be exact Pinyin version of his Chinese name.

We can then separately request to have this name changed into correct foreign version.

Heads up!

Earlier this month I made a regular bank transfer from my foreign bank to my Bank of China account, like I have done numerous time before.

However, the money didn't arrive to my account (usually it just takes 3 days or so), so after a week of waiting we today went to the main BOC branch on Beijing Lu to ask about it.

Turns out, you now have to indicate in the message of the bank transfer, what the money is for. In my case, something like "Money for living expenses in China" would work.

Previously, I have just put some meaningless text like "Hello" in it, thinking that it is a message just for the recipient (myself) and not serving any greater purpose.

Because this information was not included in the transfer, the bank just held the money. I didn't even receive call or anything about it.

We did this the other way - our son has all Chinese paperwork, including hukou, ID and passport, and we are considering if/when to get foreign passport. I can only assume that this new change works this way too - we can get the foreign passport without it becoming challenging to hold his Chinese passport at same time.

However, this challenges me:

"my son can get a Hukou, ID and indeed a Chinese passport and STILL get the Entry/Exit permits"

If he has Chinese passport, why would he need Entry/Exit permits? At least our son (1yr) could travel to Europe just fine with Chinese passport. Of course he needed Schengen visa, since he doesn't share my nationality yet.

But I have understood that a Chinese passport would allow one to leave the country, and the foreign passport for the destination would allow one to arrive there = no separate Exit/Entry permits needed.

Though previously the problem of holding two passports would have been a problem, since China would have interpreted the presence of foreign passport as the Chinese nationality being cancelled. This would have been apparent from foreign visa & entry/exit stamps (or lack of them) in the Chinese passport.

I think that bigger concern than server space may be privacy issue.

If you want to delete your data (or some of it), but it doesn't really delete it...