How many of those who say that speaking Chinese is not needed have:
- Actually worked in their life ?
- Actually worked in China in a business which is not English teaching, tourism, or running a cafe where 50% of customers are foreigners ?
I'm not gonna enter into the debate of who will be the dominant economical or cultural power in 10 years. Just give some experience-based facts from China's business life, to answer the question of the first poster:
Unless you look for the jobs I mentioned above (in which case the previous answers are valid, but these jobs are usually either short term jobs for young people/students or capped at some point in terms of revenu), I would say: Yes, you need to learn Chinese, as it clearly makes a difference. In short: it makes you more valuable on the job market and broadens your scope of accessible jobs.
Desirability for a foreign company:
- China scares foreign companies (and this will not change soon), and some skills are not yet findable in China (it is evolving, but not that fast, and with great differences depending on the region where you are), so foreign companies are still willing to hire expats. Among the skills they will be looking for is of course Chinese language.
Desirability for a Chinese company:
- Some companies with development strategy abroad are looking for foreigners to support their sales, or their market entry, or their cultural/legal/etc. understanding of the target country. All the people I know who are occupying such a position have been recruited among other for their fluency in Chinese, which enables them to deal with the daily work with their colleagues in their native language. Employees are not willing to change their working language just to make 1 or 2 people welcome in the company
Government
- One of the key to succeed in business in China is relations with government. Government people are often very nationalists, they are not English-trained, they are aware of their power (China: you love it or you leave it), so they don't see why they should speak another language than Chinese to you. On the other hand, they appreciate talking with Chinese-speaking foreigners, as they understand it as respect for their culture (vs. economic colonialism from the West) and as a sign of long term commitment to do business with them. (These are actually true with any business partner, but I would say especially with government people).
Personal economics:
- You can add to your salary the salary of the translator that you don't need any more if you speak Chinese
- You can add to your productivity the time you won't spend listening/reading to translations or being translated yourself. That's a lot of time.
- You can add to your mind health all the advantages of understanding what's happening around you and of not getting mad because of recurring misunderstanding (how many times have I seen foreigners starting to shout at people just because they actually missed some points in the discussion or the instructions...)