Trying to have chinese characters legible at "smaller sizes" is a hopeless cause; they contain much more information than letters do and they consequently need more space. Check out the rendering of the very common character 疆, which HN would like to slot in at basically the same size as the rest of the text. As it shows on my computer, it's legible -- but not correct. (Most egregiously, the horizontal stroke at the bottom of 土 (bottom left quadrant) is missing.) I've seen denser characters show up as blocks of pure black.