Sure, I agree that far fewer people would want to use Mandarin as a lingua franca compared to English, but that's not really a computing-specific thing but more

Sure, I agree that far fewer people would want to use Mandarin as a lingua franca compared to English, but that's not really a computing-specific thing but more a reflection of its cultural dominance in general. That said, technology follows the needs of people, not the other way round. If we were living in a parallel reality where Mandarin had the cultural cachet of English, I'm positive we would have immediately subjugated computers to deal with Chinese characters ;-)