My Take | Zhou Youguang’s extraordinary role in making the Chinese language as easy as ABC
Zhou, who has died at the age of 111, gave us pinyin, and in the process helped boost the literacy rate
Zhou Youguang, who died at the weekend at the extraordinary age of 111, is often called the father of pinyin. That was a moniker he had always disliked. He was probably right. For it ignores the full history of one of China’s most successful modernisations – that of its language.
An obituary whimsically calls Zhou the man who made learning Chinese as easy as ABC. He and his team helped create, in the 1950s, the system of romanised Chinese writing that has become standard for teaching the language not only to foreigners but school children across the country in the last half century.
In old age, he didn’t have a nice thing to say about Mao Zedong, but he was doing the Great Helmsman’s bidding. Mao was the hand, Zhou was his instrument, and pinyin was the product.
Long before he came to power, Mao wanted to replace traditional Chinese characters with those that could be standardised using the alphabet.
This was not a peculiar belief. In fact, it was quite typical of many intellectuals and revolutionaries from the 1910s onwards who regarded modernising the language as necessary for spreading literacy, and undermining Confucianism.
