No way will the non Chinese masses ever learn Chinese. It'll become a prime language simply because there are so many native speakers and they'll be making so much goddamn money, but most people cannot cope with another alphabet as simple as Cyrillic, let alone Chinese.

If the Chinese want to plug in to the rest of the world they'll need another language that the rest of the world speaks.

English is a pretty weird choice for a lingua franca considering how illogical it is compared to others. I'd favour Latin but it's a little too late for that.