&gt; Edit: To clarify, I am supposing that perhaps more English-speaking knowledge workers would be trained in the future.<p>As a side effect of US immigration policy and the hot job market for knowledge workers over the last 20 years, an extremely disproportionate number of PhD candidates in science and business at US universities are Chinese nationals. So it&#x27;s already happening -- and we&#x27;re the ones doing it.<p>I think China is aware that Mandarin will not become a global language of trade -- it&#x27;s simply too difficult to learn. But this likely suits the government just fine as it funnels all business deals through a (relatively) small group of people who are fluent in Mandarin and another language. And given the difficulty of learning to read Mandarin as opposed to say, French or English, I suspect almost all of those people will be Chinese.