I read English (my second language since 3 yr old) and Chinese (my native language), and I am an amateur linguist. I can tell you that Chinese is NOT A language just as Romance is not a language. Spanish, Italian are language. But Chinese is not. It sounds interesting, but it is the fact. You read Chinese article from the communist China, or you read the Chinese classics like Analects of Confucious, or you read the government documents from Taiwan, or even the Japanese Emperor's Imperial Rescript on the Termination of the War, you see different Chinese there. The fact is, not everything written in Chinese character is Chinese, just as not everything in Latin alphabets is Latin. The writing style, habit on use of words and sentence structures, etc. all matters. I can tell some characteristics about different "Chinese": The communist Chinese, like all communist regime's literature, is lengthy and full of unnecessary adjectives. It is annoying to read them. Interestingly, they like to judge a book on its length, the longer the better they think. The classic Chinese (pre-1920) is more "classical" and compact, but its use of words are more sophisticated because these classic literatures are for the educated, and by the educated. The taiwanese Chinese is the layman's version of classical Chinese, looks elegant but sometimes with sophisticated vocabularies. If you are looking for something easy to read, and concise, seek to Singapore or Malaysia.<p>I am not saying which is good or which is bad, but that's the style! Whether Chinese or English can read faster? If we put the language style aside, obviously Chinese. That's because Chinese writing system has much higher entropy and thus more information per square inch. However, writing style matters, a lot.