Millions of people are surnamed Lee, but in the mainland's official Pinyin alphabet - a Roman-letter system used since 1958 to transliterate Chinese characters into phonetics - it comes out as 'Li'.

Zhou Youguang invented Pinyin, a system of romanizing Chinese characters using the Western alphabet. But instead of being treated as a hero, he's now a thorn in the government's side. The 105-year ...

Zhou Youguang, a onetime Wall Street banker from China who developed Pinyin, a Romanized writing system that has helped more than 1 billion Chinese and countless foreigners learn Mandarin, died ...