Authorities in Henan Province have just announced a remedy to what they claim is the "chaotic situation of place naming," a ban on the use of foreign words or names in christening new locations.  Violators will face fines of between 200 yuan ($32.8) and 1,000 yuan for using "unapproved" names once the measures go into effect on Tuesday. The cities of Nanjing, in Jiangsu, and Changsha, in Hunan, have tried similar measures.

It's true that the use of random foreign names purely for their cachet can be annoying.

A "Venice New Town" is unlikely to have canals, gondolas, or crumbling Italian buildings, and "London Plaza" will be bereft of Big Ben, bridges, alleyways, or smog.

The blind belief that a foreign name is a mark of quality or status is a little silly, but hardly something in need of legal action. If this measure is actually enforced, think of the hours that will be wasted imposing pointless fines on harmless names, when genuine problems go unattended.

But this measure is not only pointless, but actively harmful.  The paranoia about "foreign" names damages China's attempts to create international cities and boost its soft power globally. Look at the great cities of the world, whose cosmopolitanism is reflected in their naming.

Admittedly, one of the reasons so many places and buildings in London are named after non-English locations is because they're sites where the British fought successful battles, from Waterloo to Trafalgar to Portobello. It might seem gauche to name Chinese locations after the country's past victories in Mongolia or Vietnam.

But others are named after continental entrepreneurs, like Pimlico, French version of local church names, like Marylebone, or Indian cities, like Calcutta House.

In Manhattan, place names draw on everything from native American names to the hometowns of German, Dutch and French traders. 

And then there's another question; what do we even mean by "Chinese" names? Not only are there a myriad of Chinese languages, from Putonghua to Cantonese to Hakka, Chinese citizens speak everything as their mother language. The country's currency bears inscriptions in five different scripts.

China's history, like every other nation, has not been contained to a narrow vision of a single people, but touched by languages and cultures from all over the world. Hutong, "alleyway," the single most common word in Beijing names, comes from a Mongolian term. 

And Putonghua, like all other languages, is constantly shifting to accommodate new words and phrases drawn from elsewhere.

The characters used to describe modern objects were taken from Japanese models. And young Chinese say "bye-bye" as naturally as "Zaijian." A playfulness in adapting English to Chinese, and vice versa, is one of the delights of online culture. 

Besides, if foreign names are going to be forbidden in Henan, what will happen, as commentators at linguistic blog LanguageLog pointed out, to such institutions as Zhengzhou's Institute of Marxist-Leninist Thought, or the Zhengzhou Bethune Medical College?  That's a German, a Russian, and a Canadian; are their roles, even indirectly, in Chinese history going to be linguistically whitewashed?

Linguistic protectiveness has never worked. It's the mark of countries insecure about their place in the world, determined to shut themselves off from change or to preserve a nostalgic ideal that never existed in the first place.

France's Academie Francaise, which attempts to preserve the "purity" of the French language against Anglophone influence, is a national joke whose efforts to force people to say courriel instead of e-mail are widely mocked.

Similar efforts in Quebec make the province seem bitter and insular to other Canadians. If it wants to be a global force, China cannot afford to embrace a narrow vision of language.

The author is an editor with the Global Times. jamespalmer@globaltimes.com.cn