Who will sit on the throne of the lingua franca?

Last night, I was reading the WSJ. The front page carried an article about the Chinese demanding technology transfers as part of doing business in China. GE, for example, had to share its expertise on building turbines (they put the R&D bill at half a billion US$) with their Chinese partners. Of course, no one's forcing them to sell to the Chinese and hence share their knowhow, but obviously the leverage that the Chinese have due to their huge market is enormous. Anyhow, I was thinking that if the Chinese continue to play smart, perhaps my children would learn Chinese in schools for the same reason I learned English: you can't go anywhere in the job market of 2030 if you can't speak Chinese, the language of the new economic powerhouse. Just as the US drives the world economy now, the Chinese may be driving it in the latter half of the century, not due to a decline in the US economy per se but due to the tremendous explosion of economic activity in both China and India. Lo and behold, this morning CNN carried a well-researched article on just this topic!

Expert: New 'must learn' language likely to be Mandarin