> China is huge so I can see how it could work for them, but I still have to admit it's very hard for me to imagine someone becoming say a competent web dev wit

> China is huge so I can see how it could work for them, but I still have to admit it's very hard for me to imagine someone becoming say a competent web dev without picking at least some basic English along the way, Having worked with some large software teams in China my experience was that most people could speak a bit of English (but generally didn't want to) and were nowhere near at the level needed to actually design and write software in English. If we forced them to do everything in English quality was terrible and everything took ages, but it we let them write in Mandarin things were much better.