Nowhere on the planet has a chance of taking over London or NY as the financial capital of the world unless they speak English as their first language. English is the global language of money and commerce and that's never going to change. Sure, there are 1billion plus mandarin speakers out there, trouble is 80%+ of them are peasants which means they count for nothing (sad, but true).
AK ... You do raise the single biggest impediment to their growth. English is the Lingua franca but the Chinese have recognized that and make it esier and easier for English speakers to do business there. If the Chinese were native English speakers I would have predicted they would come into their own in five to ten years ... not twenty.
Not a problem, a lot of Chinese speak English, maybe broken english, but nevertheless english. Language will not be a problem at all, because smart people can learn to speak chinese very well, if there is money to be made in shangai. Assuming China will not collapse in next 20 years, its GDP will overtake US in 15 years. I couldn't imagine the world biggest economy have no fixed income,credit market.
To be able to become world financial center, you need to be risk takers. Indian people are too conservative and they deem trading as gambling. Basically India doesn't have that kind of financial center cultures even though it claims it has British legal system. Maybe Mumbai will be Shanghai's back office some day and China outsource the quantitative analysis, programming, model development , trade settlements etc to mumbai.