My feeling on this has always been that it'd end up as a good idea, sidetracked by big money.
English proficiency is an issue that affects not just the mainland Chinese carriers but many others from non-English speaking parts of the world. Imposing a minimum standard of English is without doubt a great idea with the best of intentions, but when large numbers of guys are seen to fail the standard with the expectant impact on the airline's ability to mount flight operations and consequent hit on their bottom line, you can bet that there's gonna be lots of fiddling of the test criteria/results. Especially with a major pilot shortage looming. I don't want to sound the pessimist, but that's the way i see this going.
Who knows, in 30 years if aviation ends up revolving around China or if by then they'd be producing lots of their own airplanes the way Airbus cut in on Boeing/MD in the 70s...... we might all have to take Chinese proficiency tests!!!
Only time will tell. Until then, i say CPDLC might be the way to go - eliminates awkward accents, strange local lingo........