Чу Бонг Фу: Қытай тілі үшін жаңа технологияның авторы

Chu Bong Foo (born 1937) is the inventor of the Tsang chieh (Cangjie), a widely used Chinese input method. His renowned input method, created in 1976 and given to the public domain in 1982, has sped up the computerization of Chinese society. Chu spent his childhood in Taiwan, and has worked in Brazil, United States, Taiwan, Shenzhen and Macau.

Chu was born in 1937 in Huanggang, Hubei to father Chu Wan in, also called Chu Huai ping His family led a wandering life during the turbulent days of mainland China, and they finally settled down in Taiwan. There he studied at a local high school. He was an imaginative teenager who spent so much time reading fiction that it negatively affected his studies. Later he also became interested in cinema. After graduating from Taiwan Provincial Agriculture Institute and his military service, he taught briefly at an elementary school in Hualien. In this period he witnessed the poverty of countryside, and developed a sense of mission for rural development and cultural improvement. Finding teaching not to his taste, he went to Brazil instead to develop his career, only to find life more difficult. Over that period of time, he took up several jobs. It was also during these turbulent times that Chu flirted with the hippie lifestyle and studied at a local conservatory.

During the development of Tsang chieh method, Chu found that his invention is not only an input method, but also a character encoding method for computing systems. Unlike An Wang's encoding method of the time, or later methods such as Big5 and Unicode, Tsang chieh method does not sort characters by their usage frequency, stroke count, or radical, but is based on their composition aspect and inspired by the "pictophonetic compounds" principle of Chinese. Chu therefore began to develop a theory (which he would later call "Chinese DNA", "Alphabets of Chinese Language", or "Chinese character gene" theory). The theory states that the forms selected by Chu are the "genes" of Chinese. Proper arrangement of these "genes" can provide all functions of the characters. Therefore, Tsang chieh method as a character encoding is very useful, since it contains not only an ordered set of characters, but also precise references of shapes, pronunciations and semantics of the characters. Therefore, the system is an efficient base for a variety of Chinese information technology: smart dictionary; operating system and application software; programming language; hardware architecture of PC and embedded systems; and even strong artificial intelligence. In 1979, he invented a character generator program, which takes Tsang chieh encoded data and dynamically generates Chinese characters for screen display. In the same year, Chu's team collaborated with the Acer company, and the program became incorporated in the firmware of a "Chinese computer". Later the generator was also used in the "Tsang chieh controller board", which would enable an Apple II computer to display Chinese characters in its hi res graphics mode. A particular interesting "feature" of this early system was that it would also take and generate characters not explicitly included in the codepage, but implied by the rules of Tsang chieh. Since then, Chu has held unique views on Chinese information technology. He considered input using ordinary keyboards more feasible and compatible than speech and handwriting recognition or specialized keyboard. However, many of his other opinions have been at odds with consensus:
He uses a nationalist rhetoric on the subject. He values written Classical Chinese over various forms of vernacular Chinese. He also values it over many synthetic languages and their writing systems in the world. On the encoding issue, he said that the proposed Big5 13,053 characters codepage too small and too fixed. On the display of Chinese, he believes that the job should be done by the "calculation" of a computer's central processing unit, while the use of lookup tables and storage units should be kept to a minimum. He believes that Chinese information technology should take second mover advantage and choose an alternative path from then established Western theories. He also believes that the technology should be rooted in levels as basic and economical as possible. Instead of providing Chinese access at the operating system and application level on standard PC platforms, he believes it should be available at much lower levels using specialized firmware and hardware, which can be used in a wide variety of products. He also believes some programming languages containing syntax and tokens based on (Classical) Chinese language are necessary.