Jerry Kraus
Banned
The main reason why this never occured is because there for the most of history there was no such thing as a Chinese language. The "dialects" are ludicrously distant lexically, but with logograms, the words are pronounced different, but still written the same so people can understand each other.
So for an alphabetic Chinese you need to either make them very homogenous early on, or never unite. They do have Bopomofo as an unused alphabet (used for learning pronunciation). Do you think that anyone would use such a way of writing without good reason? The Egyptians didn't use hieroglyphs all the way down you know. As for the "many words sound the same" - that's unironically no excuse. How do you tell apart when spoken, then?
Or, if you prefer, you could simply say that Chinese pictograms ARE the Chinese language. Any verbal language can be represented, quite universally, by Chinese pictograms. That's just one of their big advantages. Chinese pictograms united the diverse dialects of the Chinese Empire, throughout history.