But Chinese isn't any more expressive, just shorter. The fact that you type "國" instead of "nation" is only lexicographically compact, not semantically. Studies show that proficient readers of Chinese do have marginally higher speed and comprehension than phonetic languages, but that doesn't translate into being more expressive.
At risk of being slighty Euro-centric, in fact, from what little I know, western literature and tradition seems to have more emphasis on semantic content and the conveyance of literal ideas than does most Chinese.
APL is also semantically compact, because every verb implicitly maps over a whole collection.* This interests me more than the whole "programming with wingings" bit, but that's the part people get hung up on. Like all those damn parentheses in Lisp, or the whitespace in Python. (Shrug.) I'm more interested in J, which limits itself to ASCII.
* Joy also does this, but seems much less practical.
Chinese is also not a great comparison, because the vocabulary is so large. I originally said Turkish, then Bosnian, but changed it to Chinese because the "page with a grid of Chinese characters" is probably how most people think APL looks.
At risk of being slighty Euro-centric, in fact, from what little I know, western literature and tradition seems to have more emphasis on semantic content and the conveyance of literal ideas than does most Chinese.