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There are a multitude of very good reasons why Chinese characters, hanzi, work within the context of writing in China. To name a few: the Chinese languages are basically made of homophones which would be harder to parse written only in letters; each character carries its own meaning, so it's easy to read a sentence even if you haven't seen all the words before, it was written by a speaker of a different dialect, or was written so long ago that sound shifts have changed the pronunciation from what the original author had in mind; despite the complexity of the system and the apparent uniqueness of each character, they're actually constructed in an ordered and predictable way, so that the more hanzi you learn, the easier it is to pick up, understand, and remember new ones.

So I don't wonder why no native Chinese dynasty ever tried to replace them, even after they started seeing alphabet- or syllable-based writing systems in use by other peoples. Even apart from the fact that other peoples were barbarians with nothing to teach the people of the Middle Kingdom, the simple fact is that hanzi work just fine for the Chinese.

But when the Manchus conquered China in the 17th century, they already had their own, much simpler writing system. Wikipedia tells me it is a syllabary, with diacritic marks to weed out potential ambiguities. It may not have all the advantages hanzi carry, but it would have certain advantages of its own. It would be faster to learn, so children and non-Native speakers alike could achieve literacy faster. Non-logogrammic writing systems are more flexible, allowing the writing of foreign words with greater accuracy. (Japanese, with its kana syllabaries, is much better than Chinese at approximating the sounds of foreign words. Korean and Western languages, with their alphabets, are better still.) And through the use of diacritic marks, even the tones that are so important to distinguishing meaning in Chinese could have been represented so that a written word, while not looking as immediately unique as it would in hanzi, could still be distinguished from similar words as readily as they are in speech. (Vietnamese took this approach IOTL; it used to be written with a system adapted from hanzi, but during the age of French rule they switched to using the Latin alphabet with loads of additional marks over the words. Today hanzi are as relevant to the lives of an ordinary Vietnamese as they are to an ordinary Westerner, and the people can read their language just fine.)

I'm sort of curious why the Qing dynasty didn't try to force the Chinese to start writing with the Manchu system, and how things would be different now if they had. (Or did they try, and it failed miserably?) It isn't as though the Manchus didn't already impose much of their own culture on to the Chinese as it was (there's a reason 19th-century Westerners came to think of topknot-wearing as a Chinese custom), so I doubt there was any feeling among the leadership that abolishing hanzi would be too disrespectful to their new subjects. Unless they just thought keeping the peasantry ignorant was worth the trouble of learning to use that unwieldy writing system themselves (entirely possible!), why didn't they insist that everyone abandon the use of hanzi and put everything into Manchu writing instead?

If they had, would subsequent history have been different apart from the mundane fact of "things written in Chinese would look different"?
Would there have been an increase in literacy that might have kept China more competitive on the world stage?
Would other nations in the Sinosphere have followed suit, even without being conquered by the Manchus?
Would the Nationalists or the Communists, if they weren't somehow butterflied away, have tried to restore hanzi and all the inconveniences that come with them in the name of shaking off all things Manchu, and could that have worked so long after their use had stopped being standard?
If the PRC weren't butterflied away, and they were using Manchu writing today, would the relative ease of use mean more foreigners would commit to learning Mandarin, accelerating its rise to the status of a must-know international language of business and politics? It's generally accepted that China is going to join, or replace, the U.S. as a global superpower before long anyway. Could they have done that even faster with a writing system that didn't look so intimidating to foreigners?
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