Korea is a solid counter example. Around the 1400's their King devised han'gul, which as of today is the dominant writing system of that country which replaced Chinese. They still study and use Chinese characters in school, but only for two specific cases: Names, and official government documents.
Historically, most of Vietnam were the settlement for Chams people with phonetic writing and language of their own [1]. They were very successful traders and South China Sea was originally called Cham Sea [2]. Then they were displaced by the Nguyen Lords who considered themselves belongs to Han Chinese, and latter enforced Chinese based logographic writing system to the populations.
Unlike phonetic, logographic writing system is neither effective nor it's efficient. In software engineering processing Japanese words is still problematic until now because of their usage of logographic writing system [3]. The are several movies and drama series documenting how the Korean moved from the Chinese logographic to Hangul phonetic writing system by their King Sejong to rapidly and significantly increase their literacy rates.
