Consider that the texting is in English. More people in China know English than there are people in England.

Texting could be done with characters. Long ago in the 1980s, Chinese character radicals especially as used in Japanese, extended the ASCII character set from 256 to 1024. Ctrl-Alt-this and Ctrl-Alt-that. Special keyboards were developed, also. It was always cumbersome. That is one reason why faxes endure over there: you can write in characters with a pen and send the message.

Be all that as it may, the Chinese government is chasing a chimera. Technology moves fast and they dare not give it up. Their own history provides the lesson: gunpowder, printing, noodles, ... When revolutionaries overran the Hidden City, they were stunned by the original artifacts in deep storage for centuries while the West literally re-invented the wheel.