There were various attempts to develop an organic phonetic writing system for Chinese, like hiragana for Japanese, for example Bopomofo (still used in Taiwan) a

There were various attempts to develop an organic phonetic writing system for Chinese, like hiragana for Japanese, for example Bopomofo (still used in Taiwan) and General Chinese (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Chinese https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Chinese). The Simplified characters that you see on the mainland today were originally part of a multi-phase scheme to eventually replace characters altogether, but the second phase (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_round_of_simplified_Chinese_characters https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_round_of_simplified_Chi...) was bungled so badly that it didn't continue. In practice Pinyin is the standard phonetic writing now and is used when people can't remember a character.