Chinese Names
Chinese names are not as simple as we though. We have nicknames, given names, family names and generation names. Nicknames are normally used within the family and friends. It normally has two characters. A prefix of "Xiao" (means junior or little) is widely used in northern China for nickname, it normally combined with another character. While prefix of "A" is popular in the southern China. A traditional Chinese full name has has three characters forms like "family name + (generation name) + given name". The given name in a full name normally related with nicknames. The core character of the nickname will be used as the given name in the full name for simplicity. Every Chinese from majority families has a generation name before they was born. The generation name indicates the generation, e.g. brothers/sisters have the same generation name. Some people do not use the generation names, and their full name would form like "family name + given name". In this case they would have one or two characters for given name, and their full name would have two or three characters. Most of Chinese family names only have one characters but a small fraction of Chinese family names have two. In this case their full name will have three or four characters.
As an example, my family name is Zhang, my generation name is Zeng and my given name is Hua. The generation name and given name are used together between colleagues and friends. Thus generation + given name could be treated as given name.
On a document we do not distinguish the generation names. We only have family name and given name. Thus generation names go to the given name.
We use pinyin of our names as the English translation. When we write our names on English documents we use the English fomat "family name + given name".
Chinese names were more complicated on the history when literature was dominating the society and social life. I just found that wikipedia has a lot more details about Chinese surname and name.
ZHANG, Zeng Hua