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Notes -
They have lots of languages in China. Most Chinese people historically didn't speak Mandarin and had no use for Mandarin speech transcribed one phoneme at a time. Characters that mean entire words are quite useful as a common written language in a nation that is so pluralistic that most people lack a common spoken language with people outside of their local region.
This is true even in the modern era. Chairman Mao learned Mandarin as an adult and it shows in his strange accent and phrasing. Like almost everyone, he grew up speaking his local language, not a common national language. But any text written by any Chinese person would be understood by him.
Today Chinese schools demand students speak the common language in class. Outside of school many still speak in local languages which are entirely different than Mandarin. I've seen shanghaiese people switch to shanghaiese to prevent people from other regions and foreigners from understanding them. Rudely right in front of everyone obviously talking about us.
But yeah, bit odd they didn't think to also make a phoneme based script so they could write out their local languages. I was going to say they actually have that, but Google tells me that was invented in the 20th century. And even the Koreans had periods in which hangul was banned and all writing was mandatory Chinese only.
Before the 20th century the vast bulk of the Chinese population was illiterate. And those that were literate were plugged into the imperial system of governance, which required the use of hanzi. There were some exceptions where ethnic minorities came up with their own syllabic scripts, but this happened mainly on the Yun-Gui plateau as far as I know, which I personally don't even consider China proper.
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