The ideas sheet for 41935 comes with alphabet suggestions and others on rebrickable.com have suggested a range of fonts using DOTs but none have been Mandarin. When I did research into the topic 16x16 was generally considered the smallest possible number of rows needed. Look at 新疆 (a Chinese province) for example, the way the two fields are stacked on each other in the right-hand character quickly tells you this statement has some general truth to it.

Fortunately there is a a font called GNU Unifont which has most of the basic Mandarin characters in 16x16 format, so I utilised a bit of python to bring it all together. The code is available here and with a bit of modification you could spell characters from most languages.

I've made instructions for 171 common characters taken from the HSK1&2 exams. Typically they need 50-80 DOTS per character on a 16x16 base plate.