Do the Chinese understand Pin Yin?

[Minty]

I know that pinyin is widely used in Singapore. People there probably understand it better than most students of Chinese, and definitely better than most Japanese people understand romaji.
In Taiwan they use phonetic characters (bo po mo fo, I forget the technical term for them), so they probably don't know pinyin as well there.

Bo po mo fo are pin yin but they are the traditional font of the pin yin system, the Taiwanese seem like the only one left that still use that. China, Malaysia and Singapore have all decided to use the new Roman pin yin font. No sure about Hong Kong.