The curse of Chinese characters is that they unite the country. You can't get rid of them because Chinese then becomes 10 languages, and they're suddenly broken up like Europe. If everything were Mandarin, you could Romanize or Bopomofize no problem (although with much grumbling of course.) But it's not, and probably not going to be as far as I know; it's like Hindi. It's the writing that makes China one country.