Chinese Among High-School Seniors (and in the Movies)

Jason Statham and Bingbing Li in The Meg, a bilingual Chinese/American movie.

There was breaking news about foreign languages last Thursday afternoon: Chinese has now overtaken German in popularity as a subject among high-school seniors in England. (I would bet the same holds for California, but I don’t have the figures.) At “A-level” — the key determinant of eligibility for college, roughly like a U.S. high-school diploma — 3,334 students took Chinese this year (up 8.6 percent on last year...