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.
I had a chance to learn latin and it was killing me. I know English is a bit weird, but latin is much harder to learn with this whole conjugation and declension.
In other words it's much easier to learn basic English than basic Latin. English gets hard if you want to know all the tenses and verb forms, but you don't need all that to communicate.