I was just thinking about the history of logographic writing systems vs alphabets, and how both of the two times alphabets have emerged (with the vulgarization of Egyptian hieroglyphs into a phonetic script which later became the Phoenician alphabet which was then the ultimate basis of all European alphabets*, and with the creation of hangul in Korea to replace Chinese logograms with something easier to attain mass literacy in) it was because of the direct problem of logograms being obtuse and requiring tons of education to become literate in, then thinking about the crisis the CPC faced with the extremely low literacy rates immediately following the revolution and the lengths they had to go to to address that.

To be clear I’m not asking “why did they not simply do better?” because they objectively succeeded in attaining mass literacy despite the difficulties posed by logograms. Instead I’m wondering if anyone’s well read enough to explain what their reasoning was? Because I can see several possibilities, ranging from “it was genuinely less work to just go ahead and do that despite the extra education logograms require when you’re building a mass education system anyways,” to something like “despite the difficulties it was politically and culturally important to make even the elite writing system that previous Chinese governments had systematically denied to the public into something everyone could use,” or even to “the thought literally never even came up: it was a foregone conclusion they’d stick with the existing system and the only question was how to teach it as fast as possible,” but the extent of my knowledge on the subject is that their desperation for literate functionaries led to them recruiting a bunch of former elites (educated professionals, business owners, and even landlords - absentee ones who lived in cities and who were thus spared the justice at the hands of their erstwhile tenants that happened in rural areas) despite their dubious backgrounds, and that they launched a mass literacy campaign which was ultimately successful.

There’s also the possibility that what qualified as basic literacy education in the classical or early modern periods was just of a materially different enough character that meant logograms weren’t as viable as a popular system even when there was a political will to try to spread literacy, whereas mass education was a solved problem by the mid 20th century and intensive enough that there was little difference between teaching full literacy in an alphabet and teaching full literacy in logograms. “Literacy” for a 17th century Korean peasant could have just been being able to read some short text with some difficulty (something that could be attained with next to no training in hangul, but would require years of education in Chinese characters), while literacy for someone in the 20th century entailed both reading and writing with complete fluency alongside a large vocabulary.

* This category includes things like Norse runes, despite their radically different appearance, as well as the creation of alphabets for Native American languages from characters that were commonly used in printed materials (that was an intentional material choice, so that existing press characters could be repurposed instead of needing new, bespoke ones in order to print in their own language).