# Zhou Youguang

Zhou Youguang (Chinese: 周有光; pinyin: Zhōu Yǒuguāng; 13 January 1906 – 14 January 2017), also known as Chou Yu-kuang or Chou Yao-ping, was a Chinese economist, linguist, sinologist, and supercentenarian. He has been credited as the father of pinyin, the most popular romanization system for Chinese, which was adopted by the People's Republic of China (PRC) in 1958, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) in 1982, and the United Nations in 1986.

## Early life and career

Zhou was born Zhou Yaoping in Changzhou, Jiangsu on 13 January 1906 to a Qing government official. At the age of ten, he and his family moved to Suzhou. In 1918, he entered Changzhou Senior High School, during which time he first took an interest in linguistics. He graduated in 1923 with honors.
Zhou enrolled that same year in St. John's University, Shanghai where he majored in economics and took supplementary coursework in linguistics. He was almost unable to attend due to his family's poverty, but friends and relatives raised 200 yuan for the admission fee, and also helped him pay for tuition. He left in 1925 during the May Thirtieth Movement and transferred to Guanghua University, from which he graduated in 1927.
On 30 April 1933, Zhou married Zhang Yunhe. The couple moved to Japan for Zhou's studies, with Zhou enrolling as an exchange student at the University of Tokyo. He later transferred to Kyoto University due to his admiration of Hajime Kawakami, a Marxist economist who was a professor there at the time. Kawakami's arrest for joining the outlawed Japanese Communist Party in January 1933 meant that Zhou could not be his student. Zhou's son, Zhou Xiaoping [zh], was born in 1934. The couple also had a daughter named Xiaohe (周小禾).
In 1937, due to the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War, Zhou and his family moved to the wartime capital of Chongqing, where his daughter died. He worked for Sin Hua Bank before entering public service as a deputy director at the Ministry of Economic Affairs's agricultural policy bureau. Following the Japanese surrender in 1945, Zhou went back to work for Sin Hua; from there, he was stationed overseas: first in New York City, and then in London. While in New York, he met Albert Einstein twice while visiting friends at Princeton University.
For a time, Zhou participated in the China Democratic National Construction Association. He returned to Shanghai following the proclamation of the People's Republic of China in 1949, where he taught economics for several years at Fudan University.

## Design of pinyin

In 1955, Chinese premier Zhou Enlai, who had a preexisting friendship with Zhou, summoned him to Beijing and tasked his team with developing an alphabet for China. Although he had only worked as an economist up to this point, Zhou Enlai had recalled his fascination with linguistics and Esperanto. The Chinese government placed Zhou at the head of a committee tasked with reforming the Chinese writing system, with the goal being to increase literacy among the population.
While other committees worked to promulgate Standard Chinese as the national language, and simplify the forms of Chinese characters, Zhou's committee was charged with the development of an alphabet intended to eventually replace characters altogether. Zhou later recalled that the assignment was a full-time job, and ultimately required around three years of work. Zhou's team based aspects of pinyin on preexisting systems: its phonemes were inspired by Gwoyeu Romatzyh and Latinxua Sin Wenz, while its system of diacritics for representing tones was inspired by bopomofo. In 1958, the Chinese government adopted pinyin (formally "Hanyu Pinyin") as its official romanization system, though by this point its intended purpose was to accompany Chinese characters, rather than replace them.
In April 1979, on behalf of the Chinese government Zhou attended an International Organization for Standardization (ISO) conference in Warsaw, where he proposed that pinyin be adopted as an international standard. Following a vote in 1982, the scheme became ISO 7098. Since its initial promulgation, pinyin has largely replaced older systems like Gwoyeu Romatzyh and Wade–Giles.

## Later activities

As happened with many other intellectuals, Zhou was sent down to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution, where he spent two years in a labor camp.
After 1980, Zhou worked with Liu Zunqi and Chien Wei-zang to translate the Encyclopædia Britannica into Chinese, which earned him the nickname "Encyclopedia Zhou". Zhou continued writing and publishing after the creation of pinyin; for example, his book The Historical Evolution of Chinese Languages and Scripts (中国语文的时代演进; zhōngguó yǔwén de shídài yǎnjìn), translated into English by Zhang Liqing, was published in 2003. Beyond the age of 100, he published ten books, some of which have been banned in China.
During a 2011 interview with NPR, Zhou said that he hoped to see the day China changed its position on the Tiananmen Square killings in 1989, an event he said had ruined Deng Xiaoping's reputation as a reformer. He became an advocate of political reform and democracy in China, and was critical of the Communist Party of China's attacks on traditional Chinese culture when it came into power.
In early 2013, Zhou and his son were interviewed by Adeline Yen Mah at their home in Beijing. Mah documented the visit on video, during which she presented Zhou with a pinyin game for the iPad that she had created. Zhou became a supercentenarian on 13 January 2016 when he reached the age of 110.
Zhou died on 14 January 2017 at his home in Beijing, one day after his 111th birthday. The cause of death was not made public. His wife had died in 2002, and his son had died in 2015. The following year, a Google Doodle featuring an animated logo in Chinese honored what would have been Zhou's 112th birthday.

## Books

Zhou was the author of more than 40 books, some of them banned in China and over 10 of them published after he turned 100 in 2006.
| Title | Pinyin | English title | Publication year |
| 新中国的金融问题 | Xīn zhōngguó de jīnróng wèntí | New China's financial problems | 1949 |
| 汉语拼音词汇 | Hànyǔ pīnyīn cíhuì | Chinese phonetic alphabet glossary | 1950 |
| 中国拼音文字研究 | Zhōngguó pīnyīn wénzì yánjiū | A study of Chinese phonetic alphabets | 1953 |
| 资本的原始积累 | Zīběn de yuánshǐ jīlěi | Primitive accumulation of capital | 1954 |
| 字母的故事 | Zìmǔ de gùshi | The alphabet's story | 1954 |
| 汉字改革概论 | Hànzì gǎigé gài lùn | On the reform of Chinese characters | 1961 |
| 电报拼音化 | Diànbào pīnyīn huà | Telegraph romanization | 1965 |
| 汉语手指字母论集 | Hànyǔ shǒuzhǐ zìmǔ lùn jí | Essays on Chinese Sign Language | 1965 |
| 汉字声旁读音便查 | Hànzì Shēngpáng dúyīn Biànchá | A handy guide to the pronunciation of phonetics in Chinese characters | 1980 |
| 拼音化问题 | Pīnyīn huà wèntí | Problems with Pinyin | 1980 |
| 语文风云 | Yǔwén fēngyún | The tempest of language | 1981 |
| 中国语文的现代化 | Zhōngguó yǔwén de xiàndàihuà | Modernization of the Chinese language | 1986 |
| 世界字母简史 | Shìjiè zìmǔ jiǎn shǐ | A brief history of the world's alphabets | 1990 |
| 新语文的建设 | Xīn yǔwén de jiànshè | Constructing new languages | 1992 |
| 中国语文纵横谈 | Zhōngguó yǔwén zònghéng tán | Features of the Chinese language | 1992 |
| 汉语拼音方案基础知识 | Hànyǔ Pīnyīn Fāng'àn jīchǔ zhīshì | Fundamentals of Pinyin | 1993 |
| 语文闲谈 | Yǔwén xiántán | Language Chat | 1995 |
| 文化畅想曲 | Wénhuà chàngxiǎng qǔ | Capriccio on culture or Cultural fantasia | 1997 |
| 世界文字发展史 | Shìjiè wénzì fāzhǎn shǐ | History of the worldwide development of writing | 1997 |
| 中国语文的时代演进 | Zhōngguó yǔwén de shídài yǎnjìn | The historical evolution of Chinese languages and scripts | 1997 |
| 比较文字学初探 | Bǐjiào wénzì xué chūtàn | A tentative study of comparative philology | 1998 |
| 多情人不老 | Duō qíngrén bùlǎo | Passionate people don't age | 1998 |
| 汉字和文化问题 | Hànzì hé wénhuà wèntí | Chinese characters and the question of culture | 1999 |
| 新时代的新语文 | Xīn shídài de xīn yǔwén | The new language of the new era | 1999 |
| 人类文字浅说 | Rénlèi wénzì qiǎnshuō | An introduction to human (written) language | 2000 |
| 现代文化的冲击波 | Xiàndài wénhuà de chōngjíbō | The shock wave of modern culture | 2000 |
| 21世纪的华语和华文 | 21 Shìjì de huáyǔ hé huáwén | Written and spoken Chinese of 21st century | 2002 |
| 周有光语文论集 | Zhōu Yǒuguāng yǔwén lùn jí | Collection of essays by Zhou Youguang on the Chinese language | 2002 |
| 百岁新稿 | Bǎi suì xīn gǎo | Centenarian's essay | 2005 |
| 朝闻道集 | Zhāo wén dào jí | Essay collection | 2010 |
| 拾贝集 | Shi bèi jí | Selected essays | 2011 |
| 今日花开又一年 | Jīnrì huā kāi yòu yī nián | Today a new year blooms | 2011 |
| 我的人生故事 | Wǒ de rénshēng gùshi | My life story | 2013 |
| 逝年如水 - 周有光百年口述 | Shì nián rúshuǐ - Zhōu Yǒuguāng bǎinián kǒushù | "The years passed like water" - Zhou Youguang's oral recounting of his life | 2015 |

## Gallery

* Zhou Youguang's former Changzhou residence, now a historical site
* An early photo of Zhou and his family
* Zhou (right) posing with writer Shen Congwen (center) and Gu Chuanjie (顧傳玠) (left) in 1946
* Zhou in 1947
* Zhou and wife in 1953
* Zhou Youguang at his home in Beijing in 2012, aged 106