Chinese belongs to the Sino-Tibetan language group. Sino-Tibetan is a major genetic grouping of languages.

The Sino-Tibetan speech community stretches from northeastern India to northeastern China, and its billion-plus speakers are found in Southeast Asia, South Asia, and East Asia.
Chinese itself is not a single language, but a language family like the Romance language family to which French, Spanish, Italian, Romanian, and Swiss Romansch belong.

Like the Romance languages, the Chinese languages are mutually unintelligible (that is what makes them different languages).
But, because they share a common history and a good deal of common vocabulary and grammar, it is much easier for a speaker of one Chinese language to learn another Chinese language than for a complete outsider to do so.

Again, this is true of the Romance languages as well.
The Chinese languages referred to here are the famous Chinese "dialects":
Cantonese, Shanghai, Fukienese, etc.
Because speakers of one of these "dialects" cannot understand speakers of another of them, the "dialects" are as much real languages as are the Romance languages.

The earliest origin of this writing system was in fact pictorial.
These early characters dating from perhaps three thousand years ago illustrate how Chinese writing began.

But this early start with pictorial writing was quickly abandoned.
It is difficult for pictures to represent abstract thoughts, and different people's drawings of the same object may differ greatly.

It is simply cumbersome to express lengthy messages by pictures. As writing became more common and as the nature of written material became more diverse, Chinese writing grew more and more stylized and less pictorial.

In the third century, B.C., Chinese writing was officially standardized to a form that is not too distant from today's Chinese writing. Since that time, the pictorial origins of Chinese writing have been largely obscured by the uniformity imposed on the writing to make it more efficient.

Each Chinese character is pronounced as a single syllable. This is the source of the myth that Chinese is monosyllabic. The truth is that most Chinese words are polysyllabic and are written in clusters of characters.

Most words in modern Chinese are two syllables (two characters).
Thus, ming means "clear, bright" and bai means "white, blank".
Put together, mingbai means "understand, clear," and onlymingbai can be used to mean "understand."
Ming can never be used alone, and bai means something different when it is used alone.

Language is simply one of the tools through which a society expresses its character, and it is to be expected, not wondered at, that Chinese society expresses the same characteristics through its language as it does in other cultural forms.

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