Inside the long quest to advance Chinese writing technology

Every second of every day, someone is typing in Chinese. In a park in Hong Kong, at a desk in Taiwan, in the checkout line at a Family Mart in Shanghai, the automatic doors chiming a song each time they open. Though the mechanics look a little different from typing in English or French—people usually type the pronunciation of a character and then pick it out of a selection that pops up, autocomplete-style—it’s hard to think of anything more quotidian. The software that allows this exists beneath...