China Step by StepPractical intelligence

How to fill in your passport name

Chinese services that verify identity ask you to retype what is printed on your passport: a Surname field, a Given name field, a passport number. Getting the strings wrong is one of the ordinary ways a wallet verification, a rail account or a booking fails. Only one published rule was found on how those fields should be typed, and it is WeChat’s: the Full Name must be entered exactly as listed on the identity document, including capitalisation and punctuation. Everything beyond that — how a Romanian Nume and Prenume map onto Surname and Given name, what to do with two or three given names, how ă, â, î, ș and ț should be transliterated, and which of the numbers on the passport is the passport number — has no first-party source we could retrieve, and is flagged on this page as editorial judgement rather than a rule.

Should I do it before China?

Yes — finish this before you fly

These strings are typed into things you set up before you fly — wallet real-name authentication, the 12306 account and its identity verification, tickets and bookings — and they are checked much later, at a station gate or a payment terminal, where nothing can be corrected. The rail case is the one where the consequence is documented: the document you present at check-in must be the document you bought the ticket with. The one place where the typing problem disappears is the arrival card, because the immigration form starts by reading a photograph of your data page rather than asking you to spell anything.

How

  1. Do before arrivalWork from the printed data page, not from memory. The one official instruction found on this subject is WeChat’s: for real-name authentication the Full Name must be entered exactly as listed on the identity document, including capitalisation and punctuation, alongside the document itself, a mobile number, address, occupation, a photo of the document and a clear photo of your face.1
  2. Do before arrivalSurname and Given name: Chinese services show the two as separate fields, and a Romanian passport labels the same data Nume and Prenume, so the surname is the family name whichever order you say it in. No first-party page mapping a Romanian name onto Chinese service fields could be retrieved, so treat this as our reading rather than a published rule — the verified anchor behind it is only WeChat’s exact-match requirement.2
  3. Do before arrivalTwo or more given names: Romanian passports frequently carry several. No first-party rule on whether all of them must go into a Given name field was found, so this is editorial inference — the safe reading of “exactly as listed on your ID document” is that every printed given name goes in, in the printed order.3
  4. Do before arrivalDiacritics: ă, â, î, ș and ț do not exist in the machine-readable zone of a passport, which carries only A-Z, so a transliterated spelling appears there next to the accented spelling in the visual zone. The governing standard, ICAO Doc 9303 Part 3, returned HTTP 403 to both a direct fetch and a browser session on the verification date, so the exact mapping is not verified here. The practical reading is to copy the spelling from the two MRZ lines at the foot of the data page.4
  5. Do before arrivalPassport Number: a Romanian passport prints more than one number, including the passport number and the CNP. Which string a Chinese form wants was not confirmed against any first-party document, so this too is editorial inference — the field wants the document number shown as Passport No. / Nr. pașaport, not the personal numeric code.5
  6. Do before arrivalThe arrival card avoids the whole problem: the immigration form asks you to photograph the data page as its first step, before any field is typed. The trade-off is that if you leave it until the airport you are photographing a document in a queue, and the notice warns that omissions or false declarations may result in entry or transit being refused.7
  7. Do before arrivalCheck the booked name against the passport before you travel. For rail, the rule is published: the document presented at check-in must be the one used to buy the ticket. For airline bookings no first-party rule on how closely the ticket name must match was retrieved, so we do not state one.6
  8. Can do in ChinaKeep the passport photo or the document itself beside you whenever a Chinese service asks for the name again after arrival, and present at check-in the same document the booking was made on.8

What can go wrong

The field rejects the accented spelling, so you invent an unaccented version of your own.

What to do instead A self-invented spelling may not match the MRZ that airline and border systems read. Copy the spelling from the two MRZ lines printed at the foot of the data page. The ICAO transliteration standard itself could not be retrieved on the verification date, so this is our reading and not a verified mapping.4

You drop a second or third given name to fit a field that will not take it.

What to do instead A dropped name makes the entered name differ from the passport; some systems reject it and others accept it and fail at a later check. Keep the booking and the verification consistent with each other, and expect to need manual assistance at a counter.3

A form asks for a Passport Number and you enter the CNP because it is the number you know by heart.

What to do instead A record built on the personal numeric code will not match the document at a station gate, a hotel desk or a payment verification. Check the entered number against the data page before submitting.5

You put your first name in the Surname box because that is the order the form seems to want.

What to do instead A swapped surname and given name produce a name that does not match the passport and can fail real-name verification or an ID check at a station. Copy each field from the printed data page.2

Verification fails and you guess at a different spelling to get it through.

What to do instead Open the data page beside the phone and copy the printed string character for character; hyphens, apostrophes and multiple given names are reproduced as printed. If it still fails, WeChat’s own feedback channel is the escalation path.1

Your passport was renewed between booking the train and travelling.

What to do instead The document presented at check-in must be the document used to purchase, so a new passport breaks the booking. Refund and rebook on the current passport before travelling.8

Last verified and sources

Each record below is shown as provenance: who published it, what kind of document it is, how far it reaches and when we last checked it. The source’s own wording is not reproduced here — most of these documents are published in Chinese, and a translation of ours would be a paraphrase standing where a citation should be. Follow the link to read any of them in the original.

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