Commission on the Unification of Pronunciation
The Commission on the Unification of Pronunciation () was the organization established by the Beiyang government in 1912 to select ancillary phonetic symbols for Mandarin (resulting in the creation of Zhuyin) and set the standard Guoyu pronunciation of basic Chinese characters. History. It was decided in a draft on 7 August 1912, a month after a conference led by the Cai Yuanpei on July 10, that a set of phonetic symbols were to be used for education purposes. The Commission was set up in December, led by Wu Zhihui (Woo Tsin-hang; ). The Commission ended  on 22 May 1913. A later similar organization that still exists that had been headed by Wu Zhihui for a while is the Mandarin Promotion Council. Members. The first meeting took place on 15 February 1913 in Beijing, with 44 delegates. The chairman was Wu; vice-chairman Wang Zhao (). There were two representatives per each of the 26 provinces. The Tibetans, the Mongolians and the overseas Chinese each had one representative. Prominent members included: Phonetic symbols. There were three main ideas of how the phonetic symbols should be: The three groups discussed for two months and adopted 15 symbols from  Zhang Binglin's all-Zhuanshu Jiyin Zimu (記音字母), which was the proposal by the Zhejiang Committee. Jiyin Zimu was renamed to Zhuyin Fuhao. After its proclamation, several aspects of Zhuyin were further modified, including: Programs. The Commission established the Seven Mandarin Sound Promotion Programs (; Guoyu Tuixing Fangfa Qi Tiao):