Chinese characters aren't totally devoid of phonetic meaning. They are often structured so that their pronunciation is hinted towards.
Nevertheless, Chinese people already know pinyin but choose to use characters anyway. You could compare the urgency of completely switching Chinese to a phonetic system to standardizing English spelling or French verb conjugations, but that's ignoring the cultural factor.
Overall I'd be very skeptical and suspicious of the view that the Chinese writing system needs to change. Mao Zedong forced a switch to simplified characters on the mainland ostensibly to improve literacy, but the comparably more prosperous and educated Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau seem to be doing just fine with traditional characters. In my view, this switch was a needless violence against Chinese heritage by the CCP and I'd hate to see anything like that repeated without a very very good reason.
Honest question: Is encouraging non-native speakers (especially given China's increasing global role) to learn Chinese not a sufficient reason? I understand that you're suspicious, but I have no involvement other than an interest in learning the language in the future.
Perhaps today some/many Chinese look upon Mao's action unfavorably, but if it improves productivity for future generations was it worth it?
Written Chinese is not possible to phoneticize, because the mapping of characters to sounds (including the tone) is many-to-one. The poem of shi was written to demonstrate this point [1].
The oral language could obviously be phoneticized, since you can't see the characters when someone talks. But I think native speakers think in terms of characters, not syllables. So you get puns based off of sound and meaning, and written Chinese takes advantage of the fact that characters uniquely describe a meaning, most notably in names. When native speakers discuss names (people, places, etc.) they often ask which character it is. In fact, it is apparently such a common question that foreigners learn the phrase pretty early on.
Language isn't just about productivity. The characters have a lot of character. In fact, you can communicate a lot simply with the choice of character, since there is a long history and connotation.
Pinyin is already a romanization that is very useful for encouraging non-native speakers. Pinyin use was also heavily pushed by the CCP, but has never been used as an option for replacing characters. Pinyin is even the preeminent method of facilitating computer input, and yet there seems to be no temptation even among the laziest internet users to drop the extra step of selecting a logographic symbol. Frankly, there is no option in existence for replacing Chinese characters.
I admit that languages evolve, and if there is ever an actual contender to make writing in Chinese significantly easier to use and learn, then a separate conversation should be had (I think this is true of all languages and scripts). However, there are a few reasons this probably won't ever happen.
Firstly, any phonetic system currently used for Chinese immediately loses the semantic complexity behind characters that not only allows the reader to guess its meaning based on the context and the components within the character, but the potential for deeper poetic meaning behind the use of certain characters and the way they look.
Secondly, all Chinese dialects can share a writing system specifically because of its non-phonetic nature. Were pinyin to suddenly displace characters, it would be useless for millions of people who don't know Mandarin.
Finally, the forced implementation of simplified characters has fractured the Chinese speaking world. Simplified versus traditional characters are not just a statement on what's more useful in a pragmatic sense but a political and cultural statement on what it means to be Chinese.
If that debate is so heated when all that has changed is the way characters look, imagine the implications of abandoning the 5000 year old system completely. Combine that with recent Chinese history -- the Opium War, embarrassment by the hands of foreigners, European and American hegemonism -- and the notion of changing a fundamental part of Chinese identity in order to cater to foreigners seems absurd.
Nevertheless, Chinese people already know pinyin but choose to use characters anyway. You could compare the urgency of completely switching Chinese to a phonetic system to standardizing English spelling or French verb conjugations, but that's ignoring the cultural factor.
Overall I'd be very skeptical and suspicious of the view that the Chinese writing system needs to change. Mao Zedong forced a switch to simplified characters on the mainland ostensibly to improve literacy, but the comparably more prosperous and educated Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau seem to be doing just fine with traditional characters. In my view, this switch was a needless violence against Chinese heritage by the CCP and I'd hate to see anything like that repeated without a very very good reason.