The finding that explicit phonological representation can facilitate encoding and retrieving of words is a major progress in reading development research. Yet, the grained-sizes of phonological units operate differently in different writing systems. This study demonstrates that Taiwanese employ the Zhu-Yin-Fu-Hao phonological system as functional operating unit in a sound deletion task. We observed the same results in elementary school children and undergraduate students. We argue that the functional operating unit of explicit phonological representation in Chinese is neither syllable nor phoneme, but the initials and finals of the Zhu-Yin-Fu-Hao phonological system.