16 Facts About Zhou Youguang

Zhou Youguang, known as Chou Yu-kuang or Chou Yao-ping, was a Chinese economist, linguist, sinologist, and supercentenarian.

Zhou Youguang has been credited as the father of pinyin, the most popular romanization system for Chinese, which was adopted by the People's Republic of China in 1958, the International Organization for Standardization in 1982, and the United Nations in 1986.

Zhou Youguang enrolled that same year in St John's University, Shanghai where he majored in economics and took supplementary coursework in linguistics.

Zhou Youguang was almost unable to attend due to his family's poverty, but friends and relatives raised 200 yuan for the admission fee, and helped him pay for tuition.

Zhou Youguang left in 1925 during the May Thirtieth Movement and transferred to Guanghua University, from which he graduated in 1927.

Zhou Youguang later transferred to Kyoto University due to his admiration of Hajime Kawakami, a Marxist economist who was a professor there at the time.

Zhou Youguang worked for Sin Hua Bank before entering public service as a deputy director at the Ministry of Economic Affairs's agricultural policy bureau.

Zhou Youguang 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.

Zhou Youguang later recalled that the assignment was a full-time job, and ultimately required around three years of work.

Zhou Youguang'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.

Zhou Youguang continued writing and publishing after the creation of pinyin; for example, his book The Historical Evolution of Chinese Languages and Scripts, translated into English by Zhang Liqing, was published in 2003.

Zhou Youguang became an advocate of political reform and democracy in China, and was critical of the Communist Party of China's attacks on traditional Chinese culture when it came into power.

Zhou Youguang became a supercentenarian on 13 January 2016 when he reached the age of 110.

Zhou Youguang died on 14 January 2017 at his home in Beijing, one day after his 111th birthday.

Zhou Youguang's wife had died in 2002, and his son had died in 2015.

Zhou Youguang was the author of more than 40 books, some of them banned in China and over 10 of them published after he turned 100 in 2006.