China wants the world to learn Mandarin.

I doubt much will come of this. Language teaching gives a very low return on investment anyway. Of every 1,000 U.S. high school students who study Spanish, how many, at age 30, could hold a conversation in that language? And then, judgments about which nation or language will be important in the future do not always stand up well. Back around 1960, we were all being nagged to learn Russian — the London Daily Mirror — my Dad’s daily paper, and a downmarket tabloid at that — actually had a “Teach Yourself Russian” column.

There is also some evidence that for ears trained on a language from the Indo-European family, Chinese is instrinsically difficult. A surprising number of the words brought into English to name Chinese things are not, in fact, Chinese. “Mandarin,” for example, comes from Hindi; the “paddy” of “paddy field” is Malay; the “joss” of “joss stick” is Latin via Portuguese, etc. The word “coolie” has a particularly interesting history. Originally Hindi, it was taken up by English, then picked up by the Chinese, who sinified it to “ku-li” (“bitter labor”). Chinese words just don’t “stick” in Indo-European ears the way those of other languages do. Even Chinese poetry is hard to memorize.

And in fact, The U.S.A. already has an excellent cadre of first-class sinologists — the scholastic “grand-” and “great-grand-children” of the early 20th century missionary kids, who grew up speaking the language like natives, were kicked out of China by Mao, and ended up teaching in American universities. The DeFrancis readers were easily available, even in England, from about 1970; and other Yale Chinese texts set the pace in Chinese studies for English speakers from the 1960s on.

My guess is that the next half-century or so will see some outward seeping of Chinese culture (including language) into the Anglosphere, but that this will be a limited and marginal process. There will be an occasional Chinese hit song. (To join this early-1950s hit.) We shall see more Chinese movie stars like Zhang Ziyi. Chinese religious cults like Falun Gong might get a footing in New Age circles. Bits of Chinese slang might be incorporated into English, like the Russian words in Clockwork Orange. (Annie Wang is doing her best to advance this particular development.) Our cadre of good sinologists will grow, and with a bit of luck Chinese studies might reach the same scope & level of interest as, say, Classics. That’ll be it.