Having listened to the youtube excerpt I can not hear anything wrong with the JFK controller. He was unnecessarilly verbose to the pilot before the Air China, but there was nothing wrong with his controlling of the Air China. In fact he went out of his way to ask the question slowly and several times over.
I don't know whether chinese airlines still use interpreters on the jump seat, they certainly used to . That would cause problems as the interpreter had to reply to ATC and then tell the pilots. With the pilots often taxiing at high speed they would often be too late in their reactions.
In fact they often seem to intentionally misunderstand so that they can get priority just so ATC can move them on out of their airspace or (as in this case) ground space.