A Voice of Dissent in China That Took Its Time Shiho Fukada for The New York Times Zhou Youguang, 106, a linguist who invented Pinyin, the Romanized spelling system for Chinese, in his study in Beijing. EVEN at 106 years old, Zhou Youguang is the kind of creative thinker that Chinese leaders regularly command the government to cultivate in their bid to raise their nation from the world's factory floor. So it is curious that he embodies a contradiction at the heart of their premise: the notion that free thinkers are to be venerated unless and until they challenge the legitimacy of the ruling Communist Party. Mr. Zhou is the inventor of Pinyin, the Romanized spelling system that linked China's ancient written language to the modern age and helped China all but stamp out illiteracy. He was one of the leaders of the Chinese translation of the Encyclopaedia Britannica in the 1980s. He has written about 40 books, the most recent published last year. Leaders here might hail him as a role model for young Chinese, but for one flaw: Mr. Zhou does not support one-party rule or think it can last. So within China, he remains largely uncelebrated. As the state-run China Daily newspaper remarked in 2009, he should be a household name but is virtually unknown. A telling example of the party's discomfort with him: when the government summoned 500-plus scholars in 2009 to celebrate the Encyclopedia of China's second edition, Mr. Zhou was disinvited at the last minute. Friends say they believe it was because the Communist Party propaganda chief, Li Changchun, did not wish to shake his hand. Mr. Zhou does not dwell on such snubs. Nor do they intimidate him. He is a relative latecomer to controversy, turning his attention to politics only after retiring from his full-time job at age 85. But he is making up for lost time. Chatting recently in his study, filled with overflowing bookshelves, Mr. Zhou declared democracy "the natural form of a modern society." He rejected the argument that China is not suited to it. "You can have democracy no matter what level of development," he said. Just look at the Arab Spring. Many Chinese intellectuals share such beliefs. But the most outspoken are often the aged - Communist Party elders or retired cadres who either rely on the Chinese reverence for the elderly or who no longer worry about the consequences. China's state news media ignore Mr. Zhou's political views but not his role as the architect of Pinyin. Three years ago, he figured prominently in an hourlong documentary on Pinyin on the state-run CCTV network. Chinese characters do not directly correspond to sounds. Pinyin's phonetic alphabet enabled learners to match words easily to actual speech. "It had an enormous impact on literacy," said Victor H. Mair, a professor of Chinese language and literature at the University of Pennsylvania. All Chinese students now begin to read and write using Pinyin before moving on to characters. Sweet-natured but wry and rigidly dispassionate, Mr. Zhou works at a tiny wooden desk in a government-provided, third-floor walk-up apartment with unpainted concrete walls. His longtime colleague Chen Zhangtai, 80, said Mr. Zhou decided renovations would be too distracting. He described Mr. Zhou as the embodiment of a "true scholar." He added, "He just always seems at peace with the world." And continually fascinated by it. His blog entries range from the modernization of Confucianism to Silk Road history and China's new middle class. Computer screens hurt his eyes, but he devours foreign newspapers and magazines. A well-known Chinese artist nicknamed him "Trendy Old Guy." MR. Zhou was born on Jan. 13, 1906, when the Qing Dynasty ruled and women bound their feet. The son of a Qing Dynasty official, he married the daughter of a wealthy family and went into banking. After the Japanese invaded in 1937, his family was forced into the countryside to escape Japanese bombs in Chongqing, China's wartime capital. His 5-year-old daughter died from appendicitis. Although he never joined the Communist Party, Mr. Zhou's sympathies with it date from that period. In Chongqing, he got to know Zhou Enlai, then the party's main emissary to the outside world - a relationship that later helped save his life.