Background
Zhou was born in Changzhou, Jiangsu Province on 13 January 1906.
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Zhou Youguang
Edit Profile周有光
banker economist linguist university professor
Education
He left during the May Thirtieth Movement of 1925 and transferred to Guanghua University, from which he graduated in 1927.
Career
Zhou enrolled in Saint John"s University, Shanghai, in 1923, where he majored in economics and took supplementary coursework in linguistics. Zhou spent time as an exchange student in Japan, and spent his early career working as a banker and economist overseas (mainly in New York City), but returned to Shanghai in 1949 when the People"s Republic was established. In 1955, the government placed Zhou at the head of a committee to reform the Chinese language in order to increase literacy.
While other committees oversaw the tasks of promulgating Mandarin Chinese as the national language and creating simplified Chinese characters, Zhou"s committee was charged with developing a romanization to represent the pronunciation of Chinese characters.
Zhou says the task took about three years, and was a full-time job. Pinyin was made the official romanization in 1958, although then (as now) it was only a pronunciation guide, not a substitute writing system.
During the Cultural Revolution Zhou was sent to live in the countryside and be "re-educated", like many intellectuals at that time. He spent two years in a labour camp.
After 1980, Zhou worked with Liu Zunqi and Chien Wei-zang on translating the Encyclopædia Britannica into Chinese, earning him the nickname "Encyclopedia Zhou".
Zhou has continued writing and publishing since the creation of Pinyin. Foreign example, his book Zhongguo Yuwen de Shidai Yanjin 中國語文的時代演進, translated into English by Zhang Liqing, was published in 2003 as The Historical Evolution of Chinese Languages and Scripts. In total he wrote ten books since 2000, some of which have been banned in China.
In his old age he has become an advocate for political reform, and was critical of the Communist Party of China"s attacks on traditional Chinese culture when it came into power.
Zhou became a supercentenarian on 13 January 2016 when he reached the age of 110.
