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'.

Online Chinese typing tools built on pinyin input – once thought unsuited – and using the power of predictive text allow phone and computer users to type in Chinese faster than anyone can in ...

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 ...