People forget, but China itself has a population of 1.4 billion people. That's at least 4 times the population of the US, you never run out of people to talk to in Chinese. Not to mention, there is also Taiwan and Hong Kong, and several countries around Asia that host significantly large racially Chinese diaspora, such as Malaysia or Singapore. I'm not talking about recent Chinese immigrants, but people who have been living there for generations and have never stepped foot in China.
Language is for communicating with people, it's a rather narrow view to only see the business use for languages. If anyone wants to pick up a second language, Chinese is as good as it's going to get. You aren't limited to 1.4 billion communists to talk to with your Chinese skills, try a Taiwanese or Chinese Malaysian or smth.
I'm clearly approaching this from the point of view of language as a means to communicate and connect with people, while you see language as something that has to bring you clear benefits. I went to the trouble of writing a whole ass paragraph about how Chinese is not a single country language and there are several countries worth of people outside the firewall using it. Of course no other language under the sun will ever compare to English in terms of practical usefulness, but it's as good as it's going to be for a second language, up there with French and Spanish maybe. You don't have to assume everyone who disagrees is offended.