I'm sure when you break down written Chinese into all the basic shapes and modifying radicals, you will find a number of segments that is very close to the numb

I'm sure when you break down written Chinese into all the basic shapes and modifying radicals, you will find a number of segments that is very close to the number of bits needed to encode a single character. Written Chinese looks very complex because it codes far more than 7 bits per glyph. But that doesn't mean it is wastefully encoding. I add the caveat that traditional vs simplified Chinese suggests I might be wrong on this specific example, and that institutional stability and standardization froze Chinese writing in place before it naturally evolved to a simpler state.