In my experience Chinese academics are far more bilingual than western ones. I think that for Chinese academics the English publications are generally of a higher quality and more prestigious, but I’m sure that too will change over time. I can definitely say that Chinese publications have gotten much better in terms of quality over the last 20 years and there are now a lot of results worth translating.
At this point ML translation is sufficiently good that it does not make a material difference for the readership. This means that there is not a lot of political advantage around having a more dominant language. The bigger point is about the relative strength of the underlying research communities and this is definitely moving in favor of the Chinese.
*Chinese academics are far more bilingual than English-speaking ones.
Here in France, every academic I know, and I know quite a lot of them, are all perfectly fluent in English. Most of what they write is in English, or at the very least translated into it.
> Chinese academics are far more bilingual than western ones.
In what sense, since most of the western world doesn't have English as a native language, and many US researchers were born in other countries?
Sorry poor turn of phrase. I meant this in the sense of the publication language. Yes - most academics everywhere speak a few languages.
Chinese language publications may eventually serve the role of rapid communications, but for important results it will always be in English due to their ”trophy culture”.
That makes sense. The same trend is already happening in the west with Arxiv and Bioarxiv. Neither is as prestigious for the purpose of a lot of facility politics/rankings but in an active field both are more meaningful markers of the cutting edge than prestige publications like nature. I imagine these journals will retain their function as markers of prestige even as most of the community’s research output happens in more informal channels.