Talk politics.

It makes sense to simplify the Chinese character set. The Japanese have done well with a reduced and simplified character set. They still retain scholarship on the larger set of archaic characters for scholarly study of ancient literature. It's not much different than the way ancient Latin and Greek are treated in Western culture. There is some archaeological evidence that our phonetic characters were derived as simplifications of ideographic characters used in Sumeria. Ideograms are cumbersome for worldly applications.

In America, we have a standardized English that is promoted as the official language over all of the other dialects in use. Standardizing Mandarin is a similar process to something that has been done here.