We can only hope this administration and its supporters are a temporary aberration that the US can claw its way back out of. Otherwise, that classic advice to sign up your kids for Mandarin class starts to sound pretty good.
Instead we are seeing increased siloing of scientific domains. The EU is cracking down on EU-Chinese research cooperation (as recent arrests and deportations in France have shown), India still has a de facto freeze on Chinese R&D and China is still enforcing export controls on IP to India, and South Korea and Japan are still controlling any IP generated from their industrial research fusion programs.
We're instead seeing at least 6-7 different scientific and capital ecosystems forming, and with collaboration being tightly controlled by governments.
The EU continues to use English as the lingua franca for scientific communication due to the diversity within the EU.
On the India side, research done as part of the pact with Japan [0], Taiwan [1], South Korea [2], the EU [3], and the US [4] is done in English.
And on the Vietnam side (based on my SO's experience), all of her ASEAN-Japan and ASEAN-SK collaboration was done in English as well.
[0] - https://www.jst.go.jp/inter/english/project/country/india.ht...
[1] - https://www.iitrpr.ac.in/indo-taiwan/
[2] - https://www.ikst.res.in/ikst-en/index.do
[3] - https://research-and-innovation.ec.europa.eu/news/all-resear...
[4] - https://carnegieendowment.org/research/2024/10/the-us-india-...
All Japanese people learn English at school; few learn Chinese as you can verify by reading about the Japanese school system from various sources including Wikipedia.
Similarly in China, English is the only mandatory foreign language taught at school.
Frequently, Chinese or Japanese. For example companies in these countries employ translators. Are you suggesting they rely on primary school-level English to negotiate?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_education_in_...
> The following is the set of compulsory subjects currently taught in the Japanese education system from the primary to secondary levels:
> * Foreign languages: English (rarely: Korean, Spanish, Arabic, French, German, or Chinese)
That is to say, I would not be surprised if, in China, people are quiet fluent in English.
It is not.
The vast majority of English speakers do not live in the US or the UK. English is the most widely spoken language in the world. If you are at dinner with people from several countries, the "Lingua Franca" will almost certainly be English.
The popularity of Mandarin relies on the sheer mass of native speakers in China. That population is shrinking and that shrinking is expected to accelerate. The cultural export of China is inherently limited by its ideology - there's a reason we have (had, really) "Hong Kong Cinema" not "Peking Cinema".
In 1930, if you wanted access to the great science universities and literature, you learned German. Things can change. Quickly.
But China is not going to be the dominant superpower (except maybe if they manage to beat the rest of the world in AI). Their labor force is already in decline, which means they must gradually shift their focus from building the future to maintaining the society. Like Europe and Japan are already doing.
The bigger problem is that schools like MIT, Stanford, UCB, UCI throw (or threw?) lots of resources at students that Chinese schools didn't really do (and maybe still don't? My info is 10 years out of date). Even the lower ranked schools have ample resources and fairly well paying TA/RA-ships available. In China, you would have to work for your professor's side company to get money, and the professor might not let you graduate if you were doing a good job (again, 10 years ago, I have no idea what its like today, China is changing quickly).
India has been opening campuses abroad like IIT Madras in Tanzania [0] and IIT Delhi in Abu Dhabi [1] to cater specifically to building that kind of relationship in Africa and MENA. The majority of seats allocated (66%) are for foreign nationals.
Top Indian programs like IIT Delhi have been very active giving fellowships and subsidises for students and researchers from ASEAN [2], the African Union [3], Pacific Island nations [4], and Afghanistan [5]
And Vietnam would do similar programs as well for poorer ASEAN nations and a number of African countries (notably Angola and Mozambique) as well as Cuba
Japan has been running a multi-decade long international student and R&D collaboration program that helped jumpstart South Korea and China's R&D capacity in the 1980s and 1990s, along with much of ASEAN's more recently (my SO is a product of that). Same with South Korea as well.
[0] - https://www.iitmz.ac.in/
[1] - https://abudhabi.iitd.ac.in/
[2] - https://asean.iitd.ac.in/
[3] - https://www.itecgoi.in/index
[4] - https://www.itecgoi.in/Sagaramrut
[5] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-03-14/india-off...