I lived in Guangzhou for a couple years, recently moved back to the valley. Passed 5/6 levels of language certification, was enough to communicate with co-worke

I lived in Guangzhou for a couple years, recently moved back to the valley. Passed 5/6 levels of language certification, was enough to communicate with co-workers and deal with my projects and get around. The biggest obstacle I found was that often my ability to communicate with someone had less to do with my level and more with the person's preconceptions of "foreigners". So there would be some people where I would speak Chinese and they'd have a stunned "Whoah, a talking giraffe!" reaction, and with others it was totally normal and fluid. The concept of "internationalization" as it exists there is "more people should learn English to communicate with the outsiders", not the sort of melting pot ideal in the US. Chinese do not distinguish between race, nationality, and language, they are all one thing. It is for some reason inconceivable to 99% of people that any (white-skinned) foreigner could learn Chinese, even though most of us do. Whereas it's a real head-scratcher for them if, for instance, an American of Chinese ethnicity who grew up only with English came to visit and didn't magically know the language. There were many situations where I found myself excluded from things or where people refused to communicate with me directly at all about things that concern me, which may be as much language as cultural. So I'd say learning the language is a good investment if you spend any period of time there, but being of non-Asian ethnicity will be a giant road-block to any real sense of integration, in spite of overcoming the language issues.