China will be the new power. I’ve heard the Chinese language is a difficult one to learn. My mother was a housekeeper / nanny for a family in Michigan that owned a tire company. Their oldest son was taking over the business, and as part of his education he lived in China for I believe two years to immerse himself in the language due to China being where they purchased most of their products.

Despite conquests by Mongol and Tungusic peoples with their own, different languages, Chinese has survived as a major language. The size of the Chinese population relative to that of its invaders is perhaps the reason.

There are more than a few languages in China

The Chinese languages form the Sinitic branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family. The Chinese government considers the spoken varieties of the Chinese languages dialects of a single language. However, their lack of mutual intelligibility means they are considered to be separate languages in a family by linguists.[g] Investigation of the historical relationships among the varieties of Chinese is ongoing. Currently, most classifications posit 7 to 13 main regional groups based on phonetic developments from Middle Chinese, of which the most spoken by far is Mandarin with 66%, or around 800 million speakers, followed by Min (75 million, e.g., Southern Min), Wu (74 million, e.g., Shanghainese), and Yue (68 million, e.g., Cantonese).[4] These branches are unintelligible to each other, and many of their subgroups are unintelligible with the other varieties within the same branch (e.g., Southern Min). There are, however, transitional areas where varieties from different branches share enough features for some limited intelligibility, including New Xiang with Southwestern Mandarin, Xuanzhou Wu Chinese with Lower Yangtze Mandarin, Jin with Central Plains Mandarin and certain divergent dialects of Hakka with Gan. All varieties of Chinese are tonal at least to some degree, and are largely analytic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_language

My son's most fluent foreign language is French, with which he told me he's keeping up. His Spanish has lapsed some, but he said he's improving his Italian.

French is important since he's a nuclear engineer, and if he has to get out of the country, France would be a good place for him to go with his skill set.

Interestingly he told me this weekend - I didn't know this - that "Italian" is actually a default language in Italy, but that until unification, what we know today as "Italian" was a minor dialect, spoken in the Tuscany region, and that some Italian dialects are only marginally intelligible with one another.

He says he can read about 60% of the Italian he reads. (Italy recently discarded its laws against nuclear power.)

He's working on all of his languages. He expects, as many people do, that he may end up a refugee as the United States collapses for the most unbelievable cause, the accession of an orange pedophile conman to its Presidency.

As a side note, I recently saw a paper discussing the effect of being multilingual on the onset of Alzeimer. Apparently, knowing more than one language sharply reduces your probability of getting Alzeimer in later age and this benefit increases the more languages you speak.
They posited that this had to do with the fact that many areas of the brain are involved when speaking multiple languages and this had a beneficial effect.

Is the Chinese menu at the local restaurant in Cantonese?

I use to joke when I went to an Asian restaurant with my friends.

"I can read some of this. This one says, 'Yankee imperialists out of South East Asia." My wife would give me a dirty look and my friends would politely chuckle.

An Op-Ed in the October 21, 2025 New York Times notes that China leads in 57 of the 64 most critical technologies. Its universities dominate the top 10 research universities in the world in high tech fields. A few years ago I was given a tour of new university close to being opened in Fuzhou. Some of the labs being built for undergraduate students to use were beyond anything I have seen in the US. Given the present anti-science administration in the US, the acceleration of dominance by China in critical areas of sciences and technology is inevitable.

which is unforgivable. But the idea that the Chinese will take over the world is premature IMO. They have many weaknesses, as I understand from Sino watchers.

be the biggest military powerhouse in the future, its business methods will hurt its chances of becoming a long term financial leader.

...or scientific degrees.

I believe our Congress has two people with scientific degrees in it, and a cabinet full of people who couldn't pass a freshman level undergraduate general chemistry class.

As a world power, the United States historically had numerous problems of its own, some of which led to its collapse under a senile orange pedophile, and some of which resulted from "business practices" but nevertheless for most of the 20th century was the most important world power.

The US academic infrastructure kept it in the game. That structure is being aggressively attacked by the aforementioned intellectually challenged orange pedophile with vast power to do harm.

I am currently working my way through Issue 46 of the American Chemical Society Journal Environmental Science and Technology.

By my count, 31 of the 45 articles feature authors with Chinese names.

a good government leader. It just makes me nerdier than most. A good government leader in the United States should have knowledge of foreign and domestic affairs, economics, understanding and belief in the Constitution, honesty, some military or beneficial non-profit experience and a caring for those that have less as well as a paucity of greed and self-importance along with other attributes I can't think of at the moment.

...is present in the United States?

I am in a highly technical field myself, and like most people, know people with no technical background at all. I can more fluidly discuss any of the issues in "foreign and domestic affairs, economics" with people holding technical engineering or scientific degrees than I can with those with no technical background.

(My former Congressperson, the best Congressperson who has ever represented me, was a physicist, Rush Holt. I am hoping another physicist in Government, Andrew Zwicker, will run for the soon to be vacated 12th Congressional district New Jersey seat.)

I consider the greatest Democratic President of all time to have been Franklin D. Roosevelt. He did not hold a technical degree, but what he did know was how to call on scientists to make decisions in which science was very involved.

(I've been to his home in New Hyde Park, where I came to appreciate his vast personal library, reflecting, in my view, a powerful intellect and generalized curiosity.)

I think you may be assuming that most holders of technical degrees are intellectually monolithic. After a long career and life approaching their ends, I can say that I have indeed known examples of people with advanced degrees, even those with a plethora of post-docs, who are narrowly focused. I'm sure you do as well. That said, the overwhelming majority of the scientists with whom I've had the pleasure of working were broadly educated, many in an autodidactic sense and were thus well equipped to be leaders.

(We all know "nerds" with advanced degrees about whom one wonders how they learned to tie their shoes.)

The world is decidedly not what it was in the 20th century; the critical issues before humanity require access to highly technical understanding if they are to be solved.

That is not to say that a technical education always leads to wise choices. Neither President Carter, nor Chancellor Merkel of Germany, both of whom had technical scientific or engineering educations, in Merkel's case, an advanced degree in Physical Chemistry, made wise energy decisions.

That said, both had supple minds, and led their countries, if not spectacularly well, successfully.

Dissolving USAID leaves Africa at the mercy of Chinese and Russian colonization. I expect that within a decade China will own a lot of the land in sub-Saharan Africa. Russia is quickly taking over Northern Africa, coast to coast.

The tariffs and other Trump policies are destroying family owned farms in the U.S. Many will be sold to China. (North Carolina already has much of our pork and poultry industries owned by China; this pattern will repeat across our heartland.)

I suspect that a lot of homes in foreclosure are bought by Chinese companies.

I also suspect that China has ways to hack all our major industries, power networks, and government data.

When they begin to flex their power and we realize how much U.S. land is owned by China it will be too late.

They helped put Trump in power and they will reap a huge payout.