[inglor_cz]

The real advantage that Chinese writing has is that it bridges very different, mutually unintelligible variants of the language.

Imagine a common "Germanic" or "Roman" script that would be comprehensible to any literate person that speaks any Germanic or Roman language. So the same book could be read by people in San Francisco, Berlin, Oslo and Amsterdam without the need to learn any new language.

This might be one of the reasons why China is still one country with one central bureaucracy, which is nigh impossible to establish in Europe, all the EU-wide initiatives notwithstanding.

But it comes with a high bar to clear as to what "literacy" even means. Westerners are fully literate in their native languages after several years of elementary school; the same cannot be said about the Chinese.