WI: Mao goes ahead with replacing traditional characters with Pinyin?

When Mao and the CCP were doing the whole crush the old ways, one of the things that they did was to try and simplify the traditional characters by lowering the stroke count and striping a lot of the meaning from the characters. However, the original plan was to just do away with the characters and strokes and replace the writing system with the latin alphabet Pinyin. However, it was quickly deemed impractical due to massive disruption it would bring, and the many homophones and dialects that the language has.

So, what would have been the effects if in a revolutionary zeal, Mao orders the replacement of traditional characters with Pinyin. problems be damned.
 
Well, for one, if TTL China still splits from the Soviets and turns to the West, abandoning the unwieldy Chinese alphabet may be handy - part of what makes Chinese so hard to learn is how large their alphabet is, so communication, trade and influence may come easier.
 
The advantage of Chinese characters was its universality among the different dialects. The character 我 can be pronounced wo, ngo, ua, ngai, ngu, o, or ng'e in different dialects, but written as the same character (it wasn't simplified), and expressing the same meaning (I or me).

Changing Chinese Characters into Pinyin would make millions of people illiterate overnight, as they could only write the characters and pronounce them in their own dialects, but Pinyin is based on Modern Standard Chinese only.

So he could only do it step by step. First, do a crash literacy program with Simplified Chinese Character, then spread then use of Mandarin. And finally, only with Mandarin fully understood throughout the country could a Romanized Script proceed to take over. Mao did say that the Chinese language would "eventually" be Romanized, but Simplified Chinese was essentially a step impossible for him to skip.

Notice that this process made significant headway during the Great leader's lifetime, but began to roll back soon after he died. The "second round" of simplified characters was abolished in 1986, and movement to restore traditional characters has been on within the PRC for quite some years.
 
Neither Chinese Romanization nor Simplification was particularly associated the communist movement when they began. For more information on Chinese Romanization, please visit this website. Be informed that this site is strongly biased in favour of Romanization and against traditional Chinese characters.

A system I am personally in favour of is Traditional Chinese + Limited Use of Simplifies Chinese for handwriting when no confusion is caused + an expanded Zhuyin for beginners, loanwords and onomatopoeia + Pinyin as a Romanized form of Zhuyin.
 
Actually, China is a multilingual country, promoting Pinyin might cause the other han regions want to secede and go their own way.
 
Changing Chinese Characters into Pinyin would make millions of people illiterate overnight, as they could only write the characters and pronounce them in their own dialects, but Pinyin is based on Modern Standard Chinese only.

So he could only do it step by step. First, do a crash literacy program with Simplified Chinese Character, then spread then use of Mandarin. And finally, only with Mandarin fully understood throughout the country could a Romanized Script proceed to take over.

Or do it in the opposite direction - do a crash course in Mandarin (spoken & written in pīnyīn), and claim this is the "proper" Chinese language. Then make Mandarin the language of instruction in (Han) schools. Actually, this more or less the current status OTL, minus the pīnyīn.
 
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