Middle names

I tried to understand people's middle names--the origin and how are people middle named.
The explanation that it is influenced historically and culturally doesn't really help much; I'm sure it is to memorize certain people. However, it would be great to have some concrete examples of middle names, especially from people i know.
So one way is that the middle name is their mother's maiden name (and this is actually what we learned in school at certain point, but it is not true in all the cases); In many other cases, the middle name seems 'random', or some people don't even have one.
I'm more interested in this.

For Chinese people, we don't have middle names. Surnames come first and then the given name. The given name can be one characters or two characters, well at least for my generation. And as time goes by, we now can see some very interesting names with four characters. Some people have two-character surnames, like Ou-yang, Chang-tian, Si-tu etc. and then usually have four-character names; however, the 70s parents are becoming very creative, they usually integrate the mother's surname into their children's name; and usually it's four-character.

I also heard that, when the parents register for Hukou (some unique thing in China), the baby need to be name at least three characters, including the surname, to reduce the rate of having same names with other kids. That is probably one of the reasons why there are more and more four-character names for children.

My Chinese name is very easy. Actually, my given name is the same as my surname, which might be weird to western people. But Chinese names and western names do not work in the same way. It's not like i'm Kidman Kidman(to use some famous names:)); it does means something in Chinese. And it's easy to remember for not only Chinese, but to western people as well.