He has been credited as the father of pinyin,[1][2][3] the most popular romanization system for Chinese, which was adopted by the People's Republic of China (PRC) in 1958, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) in 1982, and the United Nations in 1986.

[6] Zhou enrolled that same year in St. John's University, Shanghai where he majored in economics and took supplementary coursework in linguistics.

[5] He was almost unable to attend due to his family's poverty, but friends and relatives raised 200 yuan for the admission fee, and also helped him pay for tuition.

He later transferred to Kyoto University due to his admiration of Hajime Kawakami, a Marxist economist who was a professor there at the time.

[6] In 1937, due to the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War, Zhou and his family moved to the wartime capital of Chongqing, where his daughter died.

[3] He worked for Sin Hua Bank before entering public service as a deputy director at the Ministry of Economic Affairs's agricultural policy bureau.

Following the Japanese surrender in 1945, Zhou went back to work for Sin Hua; from there, he was stationed overseas: first in New York City, and then in London.

[citation needed] He returned to Shanghai following the proclamation of the People's Republic of China in 1949,[5][1][2] where he taught economics for several years at Fudan University.

During a 2011 interview with NPR, Zhou said that he hoped to see the day China changed its position on the Tiananmen Square killings in 1989, an event he said had ruined Deng Xiaoping's reputation as a reformer.