Chinese writing has always fascinated the Western reader, raising a substantial interest among philosophers, linguists and laymen alike. Due to its complexity and the striking graphic difference when viewed side by side with the so-called western scripts, Chinese writing plays a protagonist role among the studies of writing in general. The present work develops a reflection on how Chinese writing is historically presented and evaluated in comparison to other scripts and to the Chinese spoken language. A representative spectrum of the Western intellectual production on this matter is analyzed, covering the period from 1784 until 2009, using texts written by linguists, sinologists, philosophers and specialists on writing. These theoretical works are critically evaluated with the aid of metalinguistic tools chosen from texts about writing, in accordance to the view advocated by Sylvain Auroux. This analysis shows that these texts can basically be considered to adopt three basic views: foneticist, semanticist and pragmatist. Each one reveals its epistemological associations on how they understand: (a) the relation between writing and speech, (b) the nexus between writing and metalanguage and (c) the iconic significance of the Chinese writing. This study suggests that the vast majority of previous research tends to consider Chinese writing as abstracted from its historical-cultural context, which results in underestimating its importance for the development of the Chinese civilization.