After all these years the Mandarin of so many people even many of China's leaders is still so poor. Imagine where China would be if the whole country had had to learn to speak Classical Chinese. I would have to disagree. Standard written Chinese was pretty common back then. Look at all the vernacular literature, which many people with relatively less education found easier to understand than Classical Chinese. By the early 20th century classical Chinese had become even more unwieldy than in its early period. Adoption of Modern Standard Chinese for writing and Mandarin as the spoken language was the right decision. Personally I prefer the vernacular over classical Chinese. Classical Chinese uses a wider range of characters to be clear because there are more homophones since words tend to be monosyllabic rather than polysyllabic.
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