I'm also learning to read Mandarin as a side thing. I didn't even realize there's no tenses. There's no grammatical gender, the sentence structure is subject-verb-object (the same as english), and the way the characters are constructed is often very logical. It's a dope ass language, way more intuitive than German or Japanese, the other two I've tried my hand at.

I figure it makes sense because it's so far away from what I'm used to and also grants me access to the language of a gigantic swath of people with whom I have almost no cultural exchange otherwise.

The communism thing is really just a niche bonus.