The Latin alphabet, and its Greek and Hebrew predecessors, were designed and evolved to be phonetic. The shape of a particular written word indicates the word’s sound, and has absolutely nothing to do with its meaning.
Chinese is logographic, or ideographic. The shape of a written word relates to that word’s meaning, regardless of whether the word is pronounced in Mandarin, Cantonese, some other Chinese language, or even Japanese.
It makes perfect sense Chinese children are taught ‘whole-word’ reading because their written language was designed and evolved as such. It makes no sense to teach English in this way.
Oh I agree with you about phonics and how to teach English.
I have struggled with Kanji for a couple of years now and those shapes rarely inform me of any meaning ";^)
I read recently that modern Chinese children begin with pin-yin, a phonetic version of Chinese, and then move on to the ideograms when they have developed confidence in reading.