And pride. I've noticed the Chinese are quick to defend their writing system, despite its lack of "efficiency". Which is understandable: it is a thing of great beauty, with thousands of years of cultural heritage.
There is a lot infighting since the Communist in the 50s/60s decided to create simplified Chinese. Traditionalists would argue that simplified Chinese writing is not as elegant/pretty as traditional (I agree, although I have a bias as I grew up in a country that kept traditional Chinese) but the dominance of China has forced almost every other place in the world that writes in Chinese to use simplified. This includes Japan, which I believe a large majority of their signs are written in simplified version of kanji.
And this spills over into the U.S. where the Chinese who have lived here (which would consist mostly of Hong Kong and Taiwanese) are now fighting (or have fought) the recently immigrated Chinese from China over which system to use in U.S. schools.
So there is a lot of pride, but maybe not in the way you believe.
Japanese simplification has some overlap with Chinese, but overall they are not the same, and the simplification was definitely not "forced" on Japan by China.
I am saying the superpower it has since become has "forced" most other countries to defer to using simplified rather than traditional.
At the same time, English is a required subject in Chinese, and hopefully as that improves, people here will get the pros (and cons) of both systems.