Zhou Youguang (13 January 1906-24 January 2017) was a Chinese intellectual who was best-known for developing the Pinyin romanization of Mandarin Chinese script in 1958.
Biography[]
Zhou Youguang was born in Changzhou, Jiangsu, Qing China on 13 January 1906, the son of a Qing official. He majored in economics at St. John's University in Shanghai, where he also studied linguistics. In 1927, he graduated from Guanghua University after leaving Shanghai due to violence between the government and anti-imperialist protesters in 1925. In 1933, Zhou and his wife went to Japan for their studies. When the Second Sino-Japanese War broke out, Zhou and his family moved to Chungking, and he worked at the Sin Hua Bank before serving in the Ministry of Economic Affairs. After the communist seizure of power in 1949, Zhou taught economics at Fudan University, and he was also active with socialist politics. In 1955, the Chinese government placed Zhou at the head of a committee to reform the Chinese language to increase literacy, and he decided to develop a romanization to represent the pronunciation of Chinese characters. The task took three years, and Pinyin was adopted by the Chinese government in 1958, although it was only a pronunciation guide, not a substitute writing system. Pinyin replaced older romanizations such as Wade-Giles, and it became the primary language for most Chinese language computer input.
During the Cultural Revolution, Zhou was sent to the countryside for "re-education", and he spent two years at a labor camp. After 1980, he worked to translate the Encyclopaedia Britannica into the Chinese language, and he became a notable author. Zhou would come to criticize the communist government for attacking traditional Chinese culture after coming into power, as well as criticizing Deng Xiaoping's ruining of his own reputation with his ruthless suppression of the Tiananmen Square killings in 1989. He died in January 2017 in Beijing at the age of 111, dying just a day after his birthday.