Zhou Youguang at his home in Beijing in 2012. Wikimedia Commons/Fong C. Some rights reserved.In the second week of January 2017, one of the greatest figures of modern times died peacefully in Beijing. He was 111 years old. His life had spanned the tumultuous period of modern Chinese history. Born in the fading years of the Qing dynasty, he was a teenager during the chaos of the republican era. In middle age, he saw the civil war that resulted in communist victory in 1949. Thereafter his life, like the life of all people from similar backgrounds in the new People’s Republic, was interwoven with subsequent experiences and movements – the campaign against the rightists in the 1950s, the apocalypse of the cultural revolution in the 1960s, and then the new world of reform and opening up delivered after 1978.
Zhou Youguang's experience contained so much of China's modern history. In many ways he was the embodiment of the country's messy but ultimately victorious struggle with modernity. And while the complex, fearsome face of Mao Zedong is the best-known public image of this struggle, inside and outside China, it is Zhou who will probably have the deeper and longer-lasting impact.
This is a bold claim. But it is based on one phenomenal contribution. Zhou was central in the 1950s to the creation of the Pinyin transliteration system. To measure the scale of this achievement, the status of written Chinese at this time must be remembered. Its complexity restricted it to very few. Attempts at reform had been stymied by the fact that, in a country where most people’s livelihoods still involved backbreaking labour in fields and farms, the task of memorising 1,000-plus Chinese characters proved impossibly time-consuming.
