Chinese does not need characters to be understood. In fact, there is the Dungan dialect of Mandarin which is written in Cyrillic and has 1 fewer tone than Standard Mandarin, yet it is still understood without. There is also the fact that Mao Zedong was a proponent of a modified pinyin script as he believed Chinese characters were classist. In addition, the modified pinyin script he was a proponent of, called Sin Wenz, was used for years by a newspaper successfully and by people around him as well. Furthermore, several similar languages have ended use of Chinese characters without issue. Vietnamese, a tonal language, got rid of characters in the 1900s, as well as North Korean, a non-tonal language. Examples such as the Shi poem about the lion are irrelevant. It would be the same as if I were to quote the sentence "Buffulo buffulo buffulo Buffulo buffulo" and asking why English hasn't adopted a character based system to sort out the ambiguities of that sentence. Such extreme examples are cherry picked, and one could find similar examples in Korean and Vietnamese. So you might say, “well what if I just write shí, how would anyone know what I mean”.  Truly, when do we ever write things with zero context? Only the most exceedingly rare of circumstances. Imagine if I simply wrote the word “lead” somewhere. What did I mean? The metal? The verb meaning to lead (someone, somewhere)? The noun meaning being ahead (especially in a race)? The noun meaning information a cold caller has to get a customer? These are all possible definitions of the word, but without context you can’t know. I can even give a personal example in English. Once, in an English class I took when I was a teenager, the teacher asked for examples of homophones, so I said “taught, as in to teach, and taut, as in pulled tight”. See, I had to give context for the words or else some listeners might not have understood. This is the same for any language. Context is key. Furthermore, as I’ve previously mentioned, Vietnamese is a monosyllabic language that is highly homophonous, and yet it had no issues getting rid of Chinese characters. Finally, obviously, linguistically speaking, any language that can be spoken can be written how it is spoken and be understood. There is zero scientific evidence to support the idea that Chinese cannot be written without Characters, and its syllabic density does not prevent writing reform. To be sure, just because I have said all of this, does not mean I am in favour of getting rid of Chinese characters. I am not. I just don't want to see misinformation being spread. To sum up, the idea that Chinese has to use Chinese characters is unfounded and unscientific, but that does not mean any group is legitimately calling for the romanization of Chinese. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungan_language http://pinyin.info/romanization/sinwenz/index.html http://pinyin.info/readings/defrancis/chinese_writing_reform.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latinxua_Sin_Wenz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch%E1%BB%AF_N%C3%B4m https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanja