{"id":6306,"date":"2012-03-03T11:08:47","date_gmt":"2012-03-03T03:08:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/?p=6306"},"modified":"2012-03-03T13:36:36","modified_gmt":"2012-03-03T05:36:36","slug":"zhou-youguang-on-politics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/2012\/zhou-youguang-on-politics\/","title":{"rendered":"Zhou Youguang on politics"},"content":{"rendered":"

The New York Times<\/i> has just published a profile of Zhou Youguang, who is often called “the father of Pinyin” (though he modestly prefers to stress that others worked with him): A Chinese Voice of Dissent That Took Its Time<\/a>. <\/p>\n

This profile focuses not only on Zhou’s role in the creation of Hanyu Pinyin but also on his political views, which he has become increasingly public with. <\/p>\n

About Mao, he said in an interview: \u201cI deny he did any good.\u201d About the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre: \u201cI am sure one day justice will be done.\u201d About popular support for the Communist Party: \u201cThe people have no freedom to express themselves, so we cannot know.\u201d <\/p>\n

As for fostering creativity in the Communist system, Mr. Zhou had this to say, in a 2010 book of essays: \u201cInventions are flowers that grow out of the soil of freedom. Innovation and invention don\u2019t grow out of the government\u2019s orders.\u201d <\/p>\n

No sooner had the first batch of copies been printed than the book was banned in China.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Although the reporter’s assertion, following the PRC’s official figures, that “China all but stamp[ed] out illiteracy” is well wide of the mark, there is no denying Pinyin’s crucial role in this area. I recommend reading the whole article. <\/p>\n

\"Zhou<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The New York Times has just published a profile of Zhou Youguang, who is often called “the father of Pinyin” (though he modestly prefers to stress that others worked with him): A Chinese Voice of Dissent That Took Its Time. … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,12,106,55,32,20,19,272],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6306","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-china","category-chinese","category-hanyu","category-literacy","category-mandarin","category-pinyin","category-romanization","category-zhou-youguang"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6306","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6306"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6306\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6310,"href":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6306\/revisions\/6310"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6306"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6306"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6306"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}