Governments in the US and the UK are increasingly recognizing the importance of offering Chinese language classes in the school systems. One 2008 poll of employers in the UK, done by the Confederation of British Industry, discovered that 38% of employers answering the poll wanted to hire people who spoke either Mandarin or Cantonese. (The two were lumped together in the survey.) French speakers and German speakers ranked higher, at 52% and 43% respectively. Spanish was desired by 28% of employers.

The UK Schools Secretary said, in part as a result of this survey, that he would like every teenager to have a chance to learn Mandarin. He would also like to see Japanese, Arabic, Portuguese, and Indonesian offered more widely than they are at present. One secondary school in seven in the UK is already teaching Mandarin.

“In this new decade our ties with emerging economies like China will become even more important and it’s vital that young people are equipped with the skills which they need, and British businesses need too, in order to succeed in a rapidly-changing world,” Mr. Balls said.

In the United States, interest in learning Chinese used to come from Asian parents who wanted their children to keep up with the cultures they came from.

Now, more and more non-Asian parents see learning Chinese as a useful tool for their children, one that will help them compete for top jobs. The US government also sees the benefits of a good pool of Chinese speakers. Some of the school districts in the internationally-minded suburbs of Washington, DC, have offered Mandarin for decades.

Mandarin is the prominent version of Chinese, spoken by something like 885 million people out of the 1.3 billion who speak some form of Chinese.

(The news sources from which I found this information did not address the use of self-study programs like Fluenz Mandarin and Rocket Chinese.)