I was just thinking about the history of logographic writing systems vs alphabets, and how both of the two times alphabets have emerged (with the vulgarization of Egyptian hieroglyphs into a phonetic script which later became the Phoenician alphabet which was then the ultimate basis of all European alphabets*, and with the creation of hangul in Korea to replace Chinese logograms with something easier to attain mass literacy in) it was because of the direct problem of logograms being obtuse and requiring tons of education to become literate in, then thinking about the crisis the CPC faced with the extremely low literacy rates immediately following the revolution and the lengths they had to go to to address that.
To be clear I'm not asking "why did they not simply do better?" because they objectively succeeded in attaining mass literacy despite the difficulties posed by logograms. Instead I'm wondering if anyone's well read enough to explain what their reasoning was? Because I can see several possibilities, ranging from "it was genuinely less work to just go ahead and do that despite the extra education logograms require when you're building a mass education system anyways," to something like "despite the difficulties it was politically and culturally important to make even the elite writing system that previous Chinese governments had systematically denied to the public into something everyone could use," or even to "the thought literally never even came up: it was a foregone conclusion they'd stick with the existing system and the only question was how to teach it as fast as possible," but the extent of my knowledge on the subject is that their desperation for literate functionaries led to them recruiting a bunch of former elites (educated professionals, business owners, and even landlords - absentee ones who lived in cities and who were thus spared the justice at the hands of their erstwhile tenants that happened in rural areas) despite their dubious backgrounds, and that they launched a mass literacy campaign which was ultimately successful.
There's also the possibility that what qualified as basic literacy education in the classical or early modern periods was just of a materially different enough character that meant logograms weren't as viable as a popular system even when there was a political will to try to spread literacy, whereas mass education was a solved problem by the mid 20th century and intensive enough that there was little difference between teaching full literacy in an alphabet and teaching full literacy in logograms. "Literacy" for a 17th century Korean peasant could have just been being able to read some short text with some difficulty (something that could be attained with next to no training in hangul, but would require years of education in Chinese characters), while literacy for someone in the 20th century entailed both reading and writing with complete fluency alongside a large vocabulary.
* This category includes things like Norse runes, despite their radically different appearance, as well as the creation of alphabets for Native American languages from characters that were commonly used in printed materials (that was an intentional material choice, so that existing press characters could be repurposed instead of needing new, bespoke ones in order to print in their own language).
So first, they did create a new phonetic system called hanyu pinyin, which is still in use today. There were some attempts to fully replace hanzi with it, but that didn't end up happening.
Second, the reason China had mass illiteracy really wasn't cuz the Chinese writing system was too hard for most people to learn, it was cuz there had been no effort made to educate the people. Just like most of Europe used to be illiterate while using an alphabet.
Third, I think you are waaaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyyyyyy off here: I think calling the Chinese writing system obtuse and elite is borderline chauvinism (or maybe not even borderline), though I don't want to accuse you of that and I assume was done out of ignorance and not malice. As an English speaker trying to learn Chinese, I think their writing system is one of the easier aspects of the language to learn, and I don't think it is deficient or inferior to western ways of writing in any way.
Did you actually read the text of the post, or just the title? Because I'm not challenging the use of Chinese characters, but asking what the CPC's reasoning was after the revolution when they desperately needed mass literacy as soon as possible. That's not a criticism: like I said, they succeeded in their mass literacy program. I was curious about why they chose the path they did, not second guessing them. I even offered my own guesses (that when you're doing a mass literacy program anyways you may as well shoot for full literacy rather than just the most basic ability to use written language, and that it would have been culturally and politically important to attain mass literacy in Chinese characters instead of abandoning their history and shooting for an easier new system) when asking what the actual history was.
But it does require education and study. That's the crux of it, that it requires more education to attain a baseline of usability than (true) phonetic systems (that don't have weird archaic features due being frozen at the time industrial mass printing really took off like English was) where someone can just sound out words (why hangul was created to replace Chinese characters in Korea, for example), even though once past that initial hurdle there's probably not much difference in total education required for full literate proficiency in either system.
That's also why logographic systems are historically an "elite" thing: they needed formal schooling, something that was restricted to more privileged classes basically everywhere on Earth; they're something difficult that the ruling classes valued and took pride in as something that set them apart from those they forced to be beneath them, which as I mentioned was also the direct catalyst for both emergences of alphabets, in ancient Egypt (to create something more accessible to clerks and tradesmen than the elite hieroglyphic system) and in 15th century Korea.
Note that's not the only time phonetic systems emerged, obviously, because abjads, syllabaries, and abugidas (I'm still not entirely clear on what distinguishes an abugida from a syllabary tbh) and whatever cuneiform was (just looked it up and apparently it included both logographic and syllabic systems) all showed up separately, it's just sort of funny that every alphabet is either derived from simplified Egyptian hieroglyphs or is hangul, and in both cases they came about as a response to needing something faster to teach than the dominant logographic systems they emerged under. Ok, and technically the vulgarized hieroglyphs were an abjad, and the Phoenician "alphabet" was also sort of an abjad as I understand it, but it developed into the alphabet that Latin and Greek scripts were derived from. I have no idea where I'm going with this so I'll just end it here.