". . . somehow the author found the alphabet of his native language to be superior." What? First of all, it doesn't appear that Chinese was the author's nativ

". . . somehow the author found the alphabet of his native language to be superior." What? First of all, it doesn't appear that Chinese was the author's native language, given that he was "forced to attend Saturday morning Chinese school" as a child, and did poorly. He was born in New York state and currently lives near Seattle. Second, and more importantly, Chiang lists several advantages of phonetic systems over purely-character based systems, which hold equally whether we're talking about Chinese or any other written languages. So even if Chinese were his native language, the differences he notes between phonetic and character-based writing systems are general differences that would exist in any language that had both systems of writing. It's not clear to me, however, that he thinks the differences make phonetic systems "superior". The character-based system has its own advantages it gains from not being tied to pronunciation, e.g., easy readability of classic texts. And Chiang expressly says that "he has no idea if he would be better off in a world" where there had never been a Chinese character-based writing system. Regarding the rate of change in China, you say that there has been rapid change "since World War II". It seems to me that this rapid change has been possible precisely because China was so backward before then, resistant to change for centuries and millenia before WW II. I suspect -- but have no idea myself -- that the recent rapid change has been enabled in large part by heavier reliance on a phonetic writing system, which as Chiang correctly points out is much more suitable for use with computers.