Hong Kong-born pop singer Coco Lee is so fashionable she is inspiring mainland fans to adopt her last name.
Technically they already have her name. Millions of people are surnamed Lee, but in the mainland's official Pinyin alphabet - a Roman-letter system used since 1958 to transliterate Chinese characters into phonetics - it comes out as 'Li'.
Chinese people elsewhere do not use Pinyin, and that makes all the difference. Mainlanders say they have scrapped their phonetic names because it is fashionable to mimic non-mainland Chinese people, whom they consider richer, more outwardly successful and more showbiz-inclined.
People change names especially if they plan to leave China or interact with overseas people who might not recognise Pinyin as the most common spelling.
So Li goes to Lee, Chen to Chan, Wang to Wong, Wu to Woo, Xu to Hsu, Zhou to Chou or Chow, Zhang to Chang and Zhu to Chu.
The changes do not appear on official documents but show up among the Roman characters in semi-formal places such as on business cards and in e-mail addresses.
Following Hong Kong and Taiwan fads is nothing new. Pop stars such as Coco Lee and A Mei have long had a following on the mainland, as have Hong Kong movies and Taiwan-style teahouses.