One of the most daunting challenges living in mainland China presents is communication. It is tough, even for the Chinese themselves. Reading, and writing Putonghua, the primary spoken language of the Han majority, is taken seriously. A popular TV ad shows people paying the price for illiteracy: job discrimination, bullying, and being shunned from everyday life. An interesting thing about observing Mainland society is seeing how people are punished for having a low-quality education; it's unfair, but still, a great motivator.
I arrived in Beijing expecting Pinyin to be an integral part of how people in the city live and work. Students here start learning Pinyin, the Latin transcription of Chinese characters, as early as pre-school. It is included in the all-important, life-defining mega-exam at the end of high school, and then it's largely forgotten. You will see Pinyin written on street signs and subway ads, but hardly anywhere else. It's not used in the daily newspapers or weekly magazines, nor in most non-reference books.
The big reason there's no readily-available Pinyin in the Mainland is pretty simple. It would give us foreigners a fighting chance. Imagine if we could immediately connect Chinese characters to the familiarity of our alphabet? We would know when the bank holidays are. We could find out which movies use English subtitles. We might even discover why that dude from Chongqing is really in trouble.
Maybe it has more to do with Mainland philosophy in regards to the Chinese language. If China used Pinyin more often, it would mean meeting foreigners halfway, and it seems no one really wants that to happen.
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