KaiS wrote:They simply don't read Latin characters 
Have you ever seen them write these Chinese characters by hand - amazing!
Well that's a stereotype --- Those factory workers actually read both Latin and Chinese characters. People in China use mobile phones all the time, and the most common way to input Chinese is by latin phonetics (called pinyin, which is almost the only input method people under age 45 use). So even those from rural areas with poor education recognize all English Latin alphabets with no problem at all.
On the other hand, in the digital era, even well educated people from China cannot write many commonly used Chinese characters. Language is seldom written down nowadays, so they simply forgot how to write them.
Situation is similar in Japan as well.
Source: I understand the Chinese/Japanese/English language pretty well. I also have quite a lot of experience living in China/Japan/the US to understand these three societies fairly well.
Fun fact: Chinese is actually my native language. I had been rarely using it for more than a decade, so my Chinese conversation ability gets worse from time to time. Now it is on par with my English one, which means, I can communicate, but make a lot of verbal/grammatical mistakes, and my spoken Chinese is usually mixed with English or Japanese words. In my spare time I sometimes practice calligraphy, as a way to remember my heritage root --- so I'm able to write more Chinese characters than normal Chinese people
