Drawing upon the international historical experience of language promotion and spread, this article attempts to explore some less addressed conditions for Chinese language  overseas promotion in an era when China emerges as a new world power. For this purpose, a new concept which I would prefer term ‘language potential’, referring to language user  population and language accumulation, is advanced. For a language to become a lingua franca, language potential plays a key role in the process. International experience shows that  politics, military and economics are insuffi cient to explain the reason of language internationalization. A key component in building up the language potential is language accumulation,  and to promote a language accumulation, to increase both translation text and original text in the Chinese language is a key. All-round quality education for the population who speak the  language as the mother tongue is the fundamental condition to raise the quality and quantity of the original test.