Wu's major in college was English so it's not unexpected. I work with many Chinese engineers, my wife's Chinese. She spoke pretty good English when she arrived

Wu's major in college was English so it's not unexpected. I work with many Chinese engineers, my wife's Chinese. She spoke pretty good English when she arrived in the US 20 years ago, and her dad, who lived in China most of his life, also speaks good English, but was trained as an engineer. I think the OP is correct that it is far more likely to find white collar mainland Chinese with a good command of English than it is to find a Westerner with a good command of Mandarin. The reasons are really simple: 1) English is taught in school from a early age. In US schools, Mandarin usually wasn't an option until very recently, mostly Spanish, French, German, and Japanese were the standard choices. 2) English is the defacto international lingua franca. English speakers can live their whole life and not really have to learn another language to consume most of the world's published information and trade. However, Chinese speakers often need to know English to consume the output of other countries. If you need to need read an AI paper, it's most likely published in English, and unless the original authors were Chinese, they're not likely to have published a good translation. Given the importance of the Chinese economy, I expect the next generation will change this asymmetry somewhat. Already many schools in California offer Mandarin immersion, and it seems even more common these days to see Australians who can speak good Mandarin.