The percent of English speaking people is probably like 4x in China or Russia vs. France or Spain. And you don't need "speaking fluency", just "advanced reading comprehension skills" to get most advantages...
I could read advanced academic papers written in English (not just technical, also philosophy and economics) well before my speaking fluency was good enough to make "live conversation" well.
Of course, there is a horrible side to it: coming from Eastern Europe and living in Western Europe, I need to "dumb down" my English a lot, and to force myself to talk slower in English when speaking with French/Italian/Spanish (French are the worse btw - never met people harder to communicate efficiently with than them... even when their language skills are ok they sprinkle that "context dependency" and "nonobviousness" into everything) people that speak "English" but are actually only fluent in a lifeless subset of "standard international business English"...
I could read advanced academic papers written in English (not just technical, also philosophy and economics) well before my speaking fluency was good enough to make "live conversation" well.
Of course, there is a horrible side to it: coming from Eastern Europe and living in Western Europe, I need to "dumb down" my English a lot, and to force myself to talk slower in English when speaking with French/Italian/Spanish (French are the worse btw - never met people harder to communicate efficiently with than them... even when their language skills are ok they sprinkle that "context dependency" and "nonobviousness" into everything) people that speak "English" but are actually only fluent in a lifeless subset of "standard international business English"...