I think perhaps more interestingly, they presumably had the opportunity to create a phonetic system like Hangul or hiragana, and certainly the institutional power to force any change through if they really wanted to, but elected not to.
Ah, yes. The romanization movement of Chinese characters[0]. We do have a pinyin system that bacame extremely important when computers came into China. If you didn't know pinyin, you would have to use other complicated methods (e.g. Wubi) to type in Chinese, which requires memorizing a whole new system.
[0]: only Chinese version available. https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%B1%89%E5%AD%97%E6%8B%89%E4...