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Is it this one? https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/06/phonics-not-whole-word-best-teaching-reading/591127/
Also, this: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1997/11/the-reading-wars/376990/ (1997! That's how old this war is!)
How do Chinese children learn to read, if their every word is an ideogram? Do they all have abysmal literacy rates, like these "balanced literacy" children from the US?
Phonological and morphological awareness do seem to be well-correlated with literacy outcomes both in alphabetic and non-alphabetic languages, and there's a lot of meta-analyses which show about the same low-moderate correlation in Chinese primary language learners as in English primary language learners. There's some studies that show cross-language transfer in English/Chinese bilingual households for phonological and morphological awareness, but no such transfer for orthographic awareness, which seems to suggest there's something fundamental about the cognitive process of organizing and mapping the set of graphemes and meaningful constructive subsequences in the written language to its equivalent phonetics and trivial phonetic expansions, which is independent of a language's orthographic characteristics.
In any case, I don't think there's any dispute that written Chinese has semi-consistent phonological and morphological structure. The majority of Chinese characters are horizontally structured phono-semantic compounds with a semantic left radical and a phonetic right radical (maybe 70-80%); around half are phonologically regular regardless of tone; and there's only a few hundred common semantic and phonetic radicals. There's clearly a massive encoding and decoding efficiency achieved through semi-consistent phonological mapping of the orthography.
It's really hard to find trustworthy or low-bias takes on this topic. There's a vivid, unsettled debate about how exactly the Chinese literacy rate improved (from <20% in the 1950s, to ~96% by the 2010s), and to what extent the introduction of simplification, pinyin, etc played a role. People get downright vicious in these discussions because they tend to get deeply involved in Chinese idpol culture wars. The debate has its own Wikipedia page. I don't place that much confidence in my understanding of how it all fits together, especially through the fog of culture war - this is a mind-bogglingly complex topic. My basic understanding is that opinions vary widely, from believing that simplification (and possibly pinyin, significantly more controversial) fundamentally enabled mass literacy, to believing it was purely a result of herculean educational investment and widespread literary access (and even that simplification/pinyin was reformist nonsense or foreign interference), with huge diversity of opinions on the relative weights of every effect within that spectrum. It seems fairly uncontroversial that China pre-1950s did not have widespread educational access, and that what access existed was often printed in traditional characters or unique regional characters that the masses could not feasibly learn without dedicated scholarly investment. The literacy rates are also undisputed. I don't think it has much relevance to the question of how Chinese children today learn to read, but it's nevertheless an interesting sideshow.
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