语言学家 Samuel Johnson 在其经济学人网站（www.economist.com)的博客上对汉语和汉字的评论：
What is the Chinese language?
So let me offer two competing visions of Chinese that help explain what the two sides disagree on. These are archetypes which few partisans may agree with every word of. But they are the basic poles of thinking about Chinese, I think. I submit them for the good of commenters, who should debate them to shreds.
In brief, Chinese traditionalists believe
1) Chinese is one language with dialects.
2) Chinese is best written in the character-based hanzi system.
3) All Chinese read and share the same writing system, despite speaking in different ways.
Western linguists tend to respond
1) Chinese is not a language but a family; the “dialects” are not dialects but languages.
2) Hanzi-based writing is unnecessarily difficult; the characters do not represent “ideas” but “morphemes” (small and combinable units of meaning, like the morphemes of any language). Pinyin (the standard Roman system) could just as easily be used for Chinese. Puns, wordplay and etymology might be sacrificed, but ease of use would be enhanced.
3) Modern hanzi writing is basically Mandarin with the old characters in a form modified by the People’s Republic. Everyone else (Cantonese speakers, say) must either write Mandarin or significantly alter the system to write their own “Chinese”.