When Mao Zedong met Joseph Stalin in 1950, he asked him how to reform the Chinese language. 'Yours is a great country,' Stalin said. 'You should create your own phonetic alphabet.'
Eight years later, the National People's Congress adopted a phonetic system known as pinyin devised by a team of scholars led by Zhou Yougang, an economist and former banker in New York, and introduced it into the curriculum of the primary schools.
It was probably the greatest invention in the history of linguistics. Since then, hundreds of millions of mainland Chinese have used it to learn how to pronounce their national language. It has been a major factor in reducing the proportion of illiterates from 80 per cent of the population in 1955 to less than 10 per cent now. It is the principal method by which foreigners learn Chinese; about 40 million around the world are studying it. In 1982, the International Organisation of Standardisation adopted it as the standard romanisation for modern Chinese, followed by the United Nations in 1986.
It has been accepted by the U.S. Library of Congress, the American Library Association and many other international institutions. In 2000, the Library of Congress spent US$20 million to convert the romanisation of its 700,000 Chinese volumes to pinyin from the Wade-Giles system it had used since 1957. Thomas Wade and Herbert Giles were two British scholars who devised the romanisation system used in the English-speaking world for most of the 20th century, until the invention of pinyin.
Pinyin has also played a critical role in adapting Putonghua to the computer and the internet; typing pinyin is the principal method used by Chinese and foreigners to select characters and access the Web. It is faster and more convenient than other methods which rely on using elements of a particular character. As of the end of last year, the mainland had 384 million Internet users, up 86 million on a year earlier, the largest Web population in the world.
Zhou, who was 105 in January and lives in a small room in a Beijing hutong, was an unlikely choice for this hero's role. Born to a well-off family in Changzhou , Jiangsu on January 13, 1905, he studied economics and linguistics at St John's University, Shanghai; he was an exchange student in Japan and went to work for the Xinhua Bank, which sent him to its New York office.