It was thanks to Zhou Youguang that Peking became Beijing, Canton became Guangzhou and Mao Tse-tung became Mao Zedong. Zhou was known as the “father of Pinyin”, a Romanised version of Mandarin that was adopted by China in 1958 and has since made the country and its language accessible to the rest of the world. It is also credited with increasing the literacy rate in China from 20 per cent to more than 90 per cent in little over half a century.
Before the opium wars of the 19th century, simplification of the country’s language would never have been entertained: China was a world power that, like most world powers before and since, believed its ways and language to be superior to all others. The wars forced China to trade with the rest of the world, and to do so an improved form of communication was needed.
The story goes that in the early 1950s Chairman Mao asked Joseph Stalin for advice on improving China’s appalling levels of literacy. Stalin suggested that substituting phonetics for the complex system of characters — as was done with the Cyrillic alphabet in Russia — was the way forward. Zhou, who was an economist who had taught himself Esperanto, was in the right place at the right time. Like many expatriates he had returned from the US after the 1949 revolution to help to rebuild his country. In 1955 he was invited to join the committee charged with reforming the Chinese language. “I said that I was an amateur, a layman. I couldn’t do the job, but they said it’s a new job, everybody is an amateur,” he recalled.
The committee spent three years working out a way to represent thousands of symbols — a traditional Chinese typewriter has more than 2,000 characters — with the 26 letters of the Roman alphabet, aided by accents and diacritical marks to highlight inflections or pronunciation. The result was that it became possible for foreigners to transliterate and speak Mandarin without having to write the ornate characters. Chinese children were now taught with the Romanised alphabet, dramatically improving the literacy rate of the population.
Zhou’s work proved to be fortuitous — computers, mobile phones and even Chinese braille would be unthinkable without Pinyin. “In the era of mobile phones and globalisation we use Pinyin to communicate with the world,” he said. “Pinyin is like a kind of ‘Open Sesame’, opening up the doors.”
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Pinyin — literally “spelling sounds” — was formally adopted by China in 1958, although it took another two decades for its use to become widespread, with the Chinese government using it for external news services at the end of 1978. The Times Atlas of the World caught up in 1980 with its sixth edition, although reviewing it in this paper, Philip Howard had his doubts. “No doubt Beijing and Guangzhou are closer to the Chinese pronunciations,” he wrote, “but I do not think that they will ever replace Peking and Canton as the way that English-speakers transcribe and pronounce the names of those great cities.” Within three years The Times had switched to Pinyin, although Peking duck remains firmly established on the food pages.
“I said that I was an amateur, a layman. I couldn’t do the job
The debate on whether Pinyin is killing off the traditional Chinese script continues to rage. However, in the age of globalisation it seems almost inevitable that a common alphabet — if not a common language — is needed, an issue that Zhou raised as long ago as 1982. “China’s modernisation, of course, will not succeed or fail on the basis of language reform,” he said, “but the two questions are closely connected.”
In his later years, Zhou seemed to court controversy, revelling in his status as China’s oldest dissident. He spoke about the Tiananmen Square killings of June 4, 1989, and criticised Deng Xiaoping’s role in the suppression of that day. “Because of reform [Deng] was an outstanding politician, but June 4 ruined his reputation,” declared Zhou in words that might have been dangerous coming from a man half his age. “What are they going to do? Come and take me away?” he defiantly told the BBC in 2012, when he was a mere 106.
He was born in Changzhou, eastern China, in January 1906, the son of an aristocrat who served in the Qing dynasty. He studied economics and linguistics at St John’s University, Shanghai, the country’s first western-style university, before transferring to Guanghua University in 1925. In 1933 he married Zhang Yunhe, with whom he spent time in Japan to enable him to study at the University of Tokyo. She died in 2002 aged 93. Their daughter, Zhou Xiaohe, died at the age of six and their son, Zhou Xiaoping, who was an astrophysicist, died in 2015.
When Japan invaded China in 1937 the family moved to Chongqing where, although there were frequent air raids, he was able to make contact with the Communist Party. “At the time they promoted themselves as democrats”, he wrote in 2012. It was here that he met Zhou Enlai, the party’s number two, who would later involve him in the language project. He moved to Shanghai, where he joined the Sin Hua Bank and avoided being drawn into the last years of his country’s civil war with a posting to New York for three years. While in the US he met Albert Einstein at Princeton, “but I didn’t understand relativity at all, so we just chatted about everyday things,” he recalled.
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Back in China in 1949 he joined Fudan University in Shanghai as a professor of economics. His acceptance of the language committee post turned out to be a temporarily fortuitous move, with Mao soon turning against China’s intellectuals. However, during the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) Zhou was branded a reactionary, separated from his family and was sent to be re-educated by the farmers, working in rice fields at a rural labour camp in Ningxia. “I had never slept on an earth bed before,” he recalled.
In 1985 he translated Encyclopaedia Britannica into Chinese, earning the nickname “Encyclopaedia Zhou”. He later translated a second edition, wryly noting the changes that had been introduced, such as the subtle shifting of blame for the start of the Korean war to North Korea (it was omitted at the time of the first edition because Chinese policy held that the US was responsible). The UN adopted Pinyin in 1986. “I still see it as a bridge between China and the rest of the world, a bridge between cultures,” Zhou said in 2009.
Although Zhou considered Deng’s market reforms to be an improvement on the wasted years of Mao Zedong, they were still insufficient without political change. “Chinese people becoming rich isn’t important,” he said. “Human progress is ultimately towards democracy.” In old age the sage-like Zhou (whose name would have been rendered Chou before Pinyin) continued to live in a modest, third-floor apartment. His work remained subject to censorship and many of his books were banned.
In 2011, however, he was thrilled to be presented with an iPad on which he could see how his work was proving to be useful in the digital age.
Zhou Youguang, economist and linguist, was born on January 13, 1906. He died on January 14, 2017, aged 111