"I am not trying to argue that we should now give up English for international or scientific communication, or try to replace it with this or that other language (except possibly in a limited way, e.g., see below on Basic English). I am not proposing to use Interlingua, Esperanto, Latin, Italian, Chinese, Russian, or anything else: I am maybe saying that we should have used Interlingua, Esperanto, Latin, Italian, Chinese, Russian, or something of the sort (probably any of the above would have been better than English) "

He really lost me when he suggested that Chinese would be a better scientific language than English. First, he didn't say which Chinese language or dialect. It's truly remarkable how many Chinese people cannot understand each other even though they speak the same language. Second, all Chinese languages are far harder than English to master speaking. Finally, writing is yet another steep learning curve.