> There are a billion Chinese, so I wouldn't blame them for not learning English while living in China. It's just not worth the effort.

I don't blame them. For the ones who get accepted to US institutions, it's definitely worth it.

> Also the fact that Chinese is almost as far as you can get from any western European language makes it really hard to learn English (or for us to learn Chinese for that matter.)

Well I definitely disagree there. I'm studying Chinese. The characters are hard and that's it. Chinese grammar is super simple. There are no tenses or subject verb agreement so verb conjugation is not a concern. After you learn the basic grammar, Chinese is just about memorizing lots of vocab.

> I can't imagine the Chinese government encouraging its citizens to lean English for political reasons either.

They can do what they want but I believe most countries these days appreciate that globalization is inevitable and that learning other languages helps assuage the burden of embracing that. China doesn't want to go back to its cultural revolution experiment and the world needs China.

China has some really interesting geography that most westerners will never see. That could change in the future with more people from each culture learning other languages. Chinese are already touring the world. When will China itself begin to become easier for the world to tour it?