... "Integrated Whale Media Investments" own 51% since 2014. Their beneficial ownership is by a family of, basically, loan sharks who are cozy with Beijing.

See, e.g. https://www.washingtonpost.com...

Yes, it's Forbes which owned by a Chinese company "Integrated Whale Media". They are friendly to CCP.

... bad choice of word.

Go to http://jobs.efinancialcareers.hk/Information_Technology.htm and start calling head-hunters. I can give you some recommendations.

http://jobs.efinancialcareers.cn/Information_Technology.htm

What made English dominate was the rise of the US as a market: if you seriously want to sell to someone you'd be silly not to learn their language.
That's why I think that Chinese may become the next lingua franca.

1) Get into QTP (or Robot or similar)
2) Volunteer to do the scripting
3) Extend tests by calling out to non QTP scripts - very useful and powerful.
4) Write these scripts in Python
5) You are now basically there ... but you could go on to C++ (to selectively improve performance of Python modules) or Java via Jython, or .NET via IronPython
6) Oh: yes, and ... Profit!

PS: you're QA experience should give you business knowledge which will help your case
PPS: business knowledge will let you transition to Business Analyst - which might actually be preferable to programming ...