“2) For argument’s sake, why are we losing out the the Chinese (if we are in fact losing out to the Chinese)? Reading and writing “hieroglyphs” hasn’t actually hurt them, has it?”
First, we’re not “losing out to the Chinese” so much as allowing the deck to be heavily stacked to favor the Chinese.
Now, on to the Chinese written language...
Years ago, I worked for a Chinese family. One of the, recently “immigrated” members of that family had been a construction engineer in China. According to him, the Chinese language was a huge handicap in any technical area. The language wasn’t nearly flexible enough to function in fields that were not native to China. To become an engineer, the guy had had to learn Russian, German and English.
This was in PDRChina where he had worked. The Russian was necessary for political reasons. The German was necessary because many of the site managers were Germans. English was necessary because, according to him, anything worth knowing/learning on engineering was published in English.
While in China in July, I only learned to read one Chinese letter/figure? It was for toilet. I only learned it because the figure looked like a toilet. Except most of them were the squatting kind.