China-Africa Stories | The Zimbabwean student taking China's rural lessons home

Tungamirai Eric Mupona came to Hangzhou from Zimbabwe in 2017 to study applied physics, and the city drew him in quickly — the crowds at West Lake, the street snacks, the easy smiles of strangers. In 2021 he was admitted to Zhejiang University for graduate studies in international affairs and global governance. Today, a doctoral student at its School of Public Affairs, he has become a young sinologist whose research keeps pulling him out of the city and into China's villages.

The focus is personal. "I was born in a village in Zimbabwe, so I take a particular interest in how China's countryside has changed," he says. As a master's student he set out to see that transformation for himself, travelling across Zhejiang — from Deqing in the north to Jinyun in the south, from coastal Cixi to mountainous Chun'an — before carrying his fieldwork to Shanxi, Ningxia, Hubei and Hunan. He studies the Green Rural Revival Program and the idea that "lucid waters and lush mountains are invaluable assets." His research notes read like a message home: the grassroots innovation of China's township and village enterprises, the organizational wisdom of rural cooperatives and the resilience of smallholder farming all, he writes, "potentially provide highly adaptable insights for the African continent."

He has twice joined letters to President Xi Jinping by young scholars from around the world — and twice received a reply. In 2021, he helped draft one as a representative of the Global Young Leaders Dialogue. In 2025, on the eve of the World Chinese Language Conference in Beijing, he was among 61 young sinologists from 51 countries who wrote again, and a reply soon followed. "Besides understanding China, we have another mission," he says. "To share what we have seen with our own people, and with the world."

Much of that sharing happens away from campus. Eric is a vice chairman of the China-Zimbabwe Exchange Centre, and he is helping develop the Harare Forum for Africa, which he hopes will bring more Chinese scholars to Africa — and more African scholars to China. He has organized China-Africa photography exhibitions and joined dialogues such as the China-Africa Future Leaders' Dialogue. He is also a regular voice on China Media Group's China Radio International (CRI) talk show Foreigners' Perspective (Laowai Kandian), with more than 150 episodes to his name. "I hope to serve as a bridge for China-Africa cultural exchange," he says.

He watches China's present as closely as its past. When the outline of the 15th Five-Year Plan was released in March, he noted that its priorities — infrastructure, green industrial parks, digital transformation — line up with Africa's most urgent needs. The plan opens this year, which also brings the 70th anniversary of China-Africa diplomatic relations and the Year of People-to-People Exchanges; for Eric, the timing points to a new stage of the relationship, one built around development and modernization. "Chinese modernization is rooted in the country's own conditions and serves its people," he says. "It offers the world, especially developing countries, a new development paradigm." His essay "Chinese Modernization and Rural China's Experience" appears in Witnessing China's Modernization, a collection published in January.

By now, Hangzhou has become a second home. In eight years he has collected firsts: his first dumplings, his first dragon and lion dance, his first time writing fu, the character for good fortune. "The way Chinese people treasure their traditions moved me," he says. "It reminded me of Ubuntu in Zimbabwe — the belief that we are all connected. It echoes, in many ways, China's own culture of collectivism."

Eric plans to continue his studies in China. His longer-term goal remains clear: "To take the experience I have gained here back to my country — perhaps it can change something at home," he says. "That is my dream." From a village in Zimbabwe to the villages of Zhejiang, it is a bridge eight years in the making — and he is still building it.