Ideogramology表意文字学 (continued 2):

The ideographic text is different from the letters of the alphabetical phonetic text which has a single letter used to represent the phonetic.  It does not express semantic meaning. In Chinese ideographic text, for example, the word “mu” 沐 (wash) uses the form side (radical) 氵to represent water, and the sound side 木 (mu) to represent the pronunciation of the word,  (沐 = 氵+ 木). But the word “木”  (wood) was originally a purely ideographic character, not a letter. In addition, many modern Chinese characters which had the original meaning do not have meaning now and only its sound part is used. For example, the original sound meaning of a lizard 蜥蜴 (xi-yi) is used for “yi” 易 of “easy” 容易 (ring-yi). It only plays the role of sound note in modern Chinese.  It is borrowed to represent the pronunciation of another character, so the loan character is essentially an ideographic character, not a phonetic letter. In general, although modern Chinese characters have a large number of ideographic characters (about 80%) that are both ideographic and phonetic. However, because all phonetic components are also ideographic characters, not letters of phonetic characters, Chinese characters can be regarded as ideographic characters.