Pinyin: The man who helped China to read and write

Witness History

BBC

History, Personal Journals, Society & Culture

4.4 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 18 March 2024

⏱️ 11 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In 1958, a brand new writing system was introduced in China called Pinyin. It used the Roman alphabet to help simplify Chinese characters into words.

The mastermind behind Pinyin was a professor called Zhou Youguang who'd previously worked in the United States as a banker.

Pinyin helped to rapidly increase literacy levels in China. When it was introduced, 80% of the population couldn't read or write. It's now only a couple of percent.

Despite being responsible for such an important tool in China's development, Zhou was subjected to re-education as part of Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution in the 1960s. He was forced to work on a farm in rural China.

In 2017 Zhou Youguang died aged 111. Matt Pintus has been going through archive interviews to piece together Zhou's life.

This programme contains archive material from NPR and the BBC.

(Photo: Zhou Youguang. Credit: Bloomberg/Getty Images)

Transcript

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1:09.8	Matt Pintus. In 1958 a brand new writing system was introduced in China. It was called
1:17.9	Pinjin and it used the Roman alphabet to help simplify Chinese characters into words.
1:24.0	Pinyin changed China forever, helping to push the largely illiterate country
1:29.0	into becoming one of the world's emerging superpowers. This is the story of the man who created it, taken
1:36.0	from interviews during his remarkable 111 years on the planet.
1:42.8	We start in Beijing, the year is 1955, and 49 year old economics professor, Joio
1:49.4	Guan, has been summoned to a gathering of the country's leading intellectual thinkers,
1:54.4	on the agenda, creating a new system for writing the Chinese language.
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