The fact that Chinese characters hinder literacy is frequently discussed by linguist and Sinologist Victor Mair on Language Log: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?cat=18

Your reaction would be reasonable if someone had claimed that a particular spoken language was hard to learn. Spoken languages are all equally easy, because they are all learned by children in a few years.

But written languages can be arbitrarily difficult, and in Chinese, people with post-graduate educations will often forget how to write common words. This is not cultural supremacy. This is linguistics.