Zhou Youguang
Chinese linguist and author (1906–2017)
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Early life and career
Zhou Yaoping was born 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, 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.
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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 Chinese Communist Party's attacks on traditional Chinese culture when it came to power in 1949.
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 are banned in China and over 10 of them published after he turned 100 in 2006.