Transliteration of Chinese

The different varieties of Chinese have been transcribed into many other writing systems.

General Chinese is a diaphonemic orthography invented by Yuen Ren Chao to represent the pronunciations of all major varieties of Chinese simultaneously. It is "the most complete genuine Chinese diasystem yet published". It can also be used for the Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese pronunciations of Chinese characters, and challenges the claim that Chinese characters are required for interdialectal communication in written Chinese.

General Chinese is not specifically a romanisation system, but two alternative systems. One uses Chinese characters phonetically, as a syllabary of 2082 glyphs, and the other is an alphabetic romanisation system with similar sound values and tone spellings to Gwoyeu Romatzyh.

Wu Jingheng (who had developed a "beansprout alphabet") and Wang Zhao (王照) (who had developed a Mandarin alphabet, Guanhua Zimu, in 1900) and Lu Zhuangzhang were part of the Commission on the Unification of Pronunciation (1912–1913), which developed the rudimentary Jiyin Zimu (記音字母) system of Zhang Binglin into the Mandarin-specific phonetic system now known as Zhuyin Fuhao or Bopomofo, which was eventually proclaimed on 23 November 1918.

The significant feature of Bopomofo is that it is composed entirely of "ruby characters" which can be written beside any Chinese text whether written vertically, right-to-left, or left-to-right. The characters within the Bopomofo system are unique phonetic characters, and are not part of the Latin alphabet. In this way, it is not technically a form of romanisation, but because it is used for phonetic transcription the alphabet is often grouped with the romanisation systems.

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