Zhou Youguang is the scholar who invented Pinyin(拼音), a system of
romanisation for Chinese characters. Since 1958, Chinese primary school
students have learnt Pinyin, before they learn characters. Thanks to him, one
billion Chinese have become literate – the greatest contribution by a linguist in
history. After an extraordinary life, he died in January 2017 at the age of 111. He had several lives – a banker in Shanghai, New York and London;
supplying food and textiles for the army and ordinary people during World War
Two;: after 1949, a linguist. He lived through all the campaigns of the Maoist
period, spending 28 months in a labour camp in west China. He wrote 49 books,
many critical of the Soviet Union, the Soviet model used in China and of Mao
Zedong. In the last 20 years of his life, he was one of the few intellectuals in
China willing to speak the truth in public. He lived so long thanks to an innate
optimism, intellectual curiosity about everything and a Buddhist-like humility to
see himself and his belongings as of little value.