I think most of us working in China have already figured this out.

More to the point, why not just romanize Chinese? The idea of having to memorize 3000 cave-drawings to "understand 90%" of a newspaper is a little ridiculous, don't you think. Just Pinyin everything. As for 'Chinese being too different to romanize', I would point out that French is radically different to English and there's no trouble there.

An alphabet (ie: Korean or Japanese Hiragana-Katakana, etc)should take no longer than a week or two to figure out and should be nothing more than the bulding blocks to facilitate knowledge, not a branch of knowledge in itself.

If the Chinese start moaning about 'cultural identity', remind them that it's fine to have a cultural identity as long as aspects of it that are outdated, farcical and overly time-consuming are removed - or at least made a recreational thing.