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 inter-dialectal communication in written Chinese.

General Chinese is not wholly a romanisation system, but consists of two alternative systems: one uses Chinese characters as a syllabary of 2082 glyphs, and the other is a romanisation system with similar spellings to Gwoyeu Romatzyh.

官話字母; Guānhuà zìmǔ, developed by Wang Zhao (1859–1933), was the first alphabetic writing system for Chinese developed by a Chinese person. This system was modeled on Japanese katakana, which he learned during a two-year stay in Japan, and consisted of letters that were based on components of Chinese characters. After returning to China in 1900, he taught his system in various parts of North China, but the government banned it in 1901.

One of Wang's contemporaries, Lao Naixuan 勞乃宣 (1843–1921), later adapted Guanhua zimu for use in two Wu dialects, those of Ningbo and Suzhou. In doing this, he raised the issue that was ultimately responsible for the failure of all alphabetic writing systems in China: the notion that people should be introduced to literacy in their own local dialects. Such a proposal would both challenge the unique position of the millennia-old writing system and create more than one literary language, destroying China's linguistic unity in both the historical and geographic senses. Because of this, there was strong opposition from the very beginning to proposals of this kind.

Wu Jingheng, who had developed a "beansprout alphabet", and Wang Zhao, who had developed 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, 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.

When Taiwan was under Japanese rule, a katakana-based writing system used to write Holo Taiwanese. It functioned as a phonetic guide to Chinese characters, much like furigana in Japanese, or bopomofo. There were similar systems for other languages in Taiwan as well, including Hakka and Formosan languages.