[mislankanova]

It seems to me (a native speaker of Mandarin) that the written Chinese is not closely tied to the phonetics or spoken Chinese. A person who could only speak Cantonese can write something that can be easily understood by someone who speaks only Wu. While an alphabetic writing system seems to be secondary to an underlying, spoken language, in which case the written language represents the way in which the language is spoken.

Such a perception might be the result of the divide between vernacular and written/literary Chinese that remained uncontested until a hundred years ago. An alphabetic writing system for Chinese would essentially unify spoken and written Chinese, which goes against the aforementioned perception. Hence the resistance against an alphabetic writing system.