English has another advantage: it's the language of "cool", i.e. a kind of soft power. It's the language of hip-hop, of Hollywood, of tech and of finance. Engli

English has another advantage: it's the language of "cool", i.e. a kind of soft power. It's the language of hip-hop, of Hollywood, of tech and of finance. English is a prestige language is many parts of the world not only due to its incumbency, but because new pop culture is being created in it every day. People learn languages for all kinds of practical reasons, but ultimately for a language to really take off, it has to endow personal prestige in some way and provide a window into a culture that is interesting or aspirational. People learn French and Italian due to the aspirational qualities of those languages. In contrast, relatively few people are learning Indonesian (outside of Indonesia) even though Indonesia is the 4th largest country in the world (yes!) by population, potentially a huge emerging market, plus Indonesian is a super simple language. It seems to me the Chinese language does not currently have much currency in the soft power domain, partly because soft power requires the export of desirable cultural goods, which in turn requires a society that endows the creators of cultural products with freedom of expression. This freedom currently exists in Taiwan but Taiwan struggles with scale. This used to exist in HK, but the HK cultural industry has been on a decline since 1997 (and HK exports its cultural products in Cantonese). Japanese is arguably a harder language than Chinese, yet the Internet is full of foreigners trying to learn it because they're into anime etc.