Comment by realusername
3 days ago
That was kind of like that with vietnamese, a mix of phonetic-only characters, fully custom characters and standard ones all blend together, it's quite a mess. I doubt any Chinese speaker can understand that.
The colonial administration didn't have to push too hard to make people switch, the customized chinese script wasn't very popular.
Chinese speakers won't understand Zhuang, Yi, or Bai as well. Latinization would probably be more effective, but China would lose some face. They even re-popularized an old form of Uighur script for Mongolian (while Mongolians in outer Mongolia/Russia use Cyrillic).