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.