English won. The Chinese youth struggle to write their own calligraphy characters they can read now. Typing favors English.
This smacks of "I saw a headline once"-itis. Especially the fact that you refer to the Chinese characters as "calligraphy characters", as if that were the general term or something.
https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/747853.shtml
https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-china-blog-28599392
Or more recently this one about character amnesia
https://globalchinapulse.net/character-amnesia-in-china/
None of these really mean that English has won, though. Rather that phonetics-based writing systems are easier to remember and use, especially in conjunction with digital systems that make it easy to map sound and context to symbols.
I wouldn't be surprised if characters are faster to read though. In English we have all these subconscious shortcuts like looking at the shape of the word, first and last letters, etc. But I think symbology can convey more at a glance. Thus the popularity of emoji
I'm pretty sure there was some controvery in the linguistic blogging community even at some stage over the last couple of years, with someone writing an essay claiming the Chinese character system was in some sense less advanced and maybe on the way out, and this leading to a serious response or two, the usual fiery academic affair. I can't locate it this instant though.
I moreso meant for OP's low-effort dramatisation to not go unanswered. Framing it as "winning" some sort of language battle is particularly silly.
Your musings are interesting though, and the topic certainly is a fascinating one. Languages that use morphemes for writing are wild. Symbology is a cool word also - surely there has to be a lisp blog somewhere with that word in the title.
Uh? Pinyin input is by far the most popular input technique in China. I rarely see anyone using handwriting input.
That being said, it has nothing to do with English winning. It's just a Chinese input technique that uses the latin alphabet. English fluency in China is not very common, especially spoken English.
And very true about the English. With some exceptions (of course), folks here maybe know a handful of words at best, and even then, pronunciation is usually pretty rough. People here really aren't using it; they are perfectly comfortable with their Chinese, and why wouldn't they be?
Anyone saying otherwise clearly hasn't been here to see it firsthand.
By the looks of it, Pinyin (a phonetic one) won by a landslide, which I suspect this is the result of a long effort by the Chinese government to install Mandarin as the official language of China, above regional dialects (different regions would write similar characters but pronounce them differently, and defaulting to Pinyin has this "nice" effect of having people "think of how it would be pronounced in Mandarin first", even when the result are characters that would be read by a Cantonese speaker).