I wouldn't say Chinese is "obsolete". Written chinese does not convey pronunciation at all and therefore changes very slowly compared to spoken chinese. That meant even though chinese people from different regions of china couldn't always communicate using spoken chinese because of language divergence they could communicate by writing. I think this has had an effect on the unity of China - over thousands of years it stayed as a single nation; in comparison the Europe where many languages have diverged from Latin and where there are many nation-states where people are bound together by their language.
If China was not united during the incursions by European countries in the 1800's, maybe they'd have ended up even worse off.
With today's technology, would you say Chinese is now un-obsoleted?
I wouldn't say modern technology has completely erased the disadvantages of written Chinese. When I was taking Mandarin in college the typing system seemed like a rather inelegant hack.
If China was not united during the incursions by European countries in the 1800's, maybe they'd have ended up even worse off.
With today's technology, would you say Chinese is now un-obsoleted?