Why are Chinese characters described as logographic rather than ideographic?

Chinese characters are classified as logographic rather than ideographic because they function as a system for representing language, not as a direct representation of thought or abstract ideas independent of speech.1

The term "ideographic" was historically used by scholars who mistakenly believed that certain writing systems could bypass language to express thought directly. However, it is now understood that thought is too intimately connected to language to be represented independently.1

In contrast, a logographic system is defined by its relationship to the linguistic structure: each character or graph represents a specific meaningful unit of language, such as a morpheme or a word. Because Chinese is an isolating language where each morpheme is typically one syllable long, the script uses distinctive logographs to represent these invariant units of sound and meaning. While Chinese characters include elements that may suggest meaning or pronunciation, they remain a conventional system for transcribing the utterances of a language, confirming their status as logograms rather than symbols of pure thought.2134