China-Africa Stories | The Sudanese student charting how Chinese film and television reach Africa

【Editor's note: 2026 marks the China-Africa Year of People-to-People Exchanges. This is the sixth in a series of China-Africa stories from Zhejiang University, featuring the students, researchers and alumni working to bring the two sides closer. This installment turns to a Sudanese doctoral student who studies how Chinese screen culture reaches African audiences.】

On 16 November 2025, Abubaker Elsiddig Ahmed Elmustafa Elsheikh Hayaty, who goes by Abu, spoke on "Online Literature: New Paradigm for Language and Cultural Communication" at a parallel session of the 2025 World Chinese Language Conference. He was one of 61 young sinologists from 51 countries invited to the three-day meeting, which opened in Beijing on 14 November under the theme "Innovation Leads, AI Empowers: Learning Chinese Without Borders."

Ahead of the conference, the group wrote to President Xi Jinping about their research; a reply reached them before it opened. Abu had also joined a programme for the visiting sinologists that took them through the Palace Museum and the National Museum of China, together with colleagues from more than 30 countries.

Abu came to China from Sudan in 2016, and his first stop was Gansu. At the Mogao Caves outside Dunhuang, the murals and sculpture where the cultures of the Silk Road met did what no library could: they made him want to stay. Ten years on he is a doctoral student of Journalism and Communication (Class of 2023) at the College of Media and International Culture, Zhejiang University, working on international communication with a focus on how Chinese culture spreads in Africa.

His argument in Beijing was specific. Chinese online literature, he said, is spreading among young African readers, mostly through online platforms, and striking an emotional chord. Chinese films and television dramas, he added, have long had strong reach in African markets. Where Western cultural exports have tended to move in one direction, he sees China's travelling through partnership, and he wants the infrastructure to match: dedicated digital platforms for Chinese film, television and documentary, Confucius Institutes hosting film festivals and drama screenings, and an organised resource hub for Chinese culture.

The conclusions come from the field rather than the seminar room. In Meitan county in Guizhou, Abu took part in volunteer English teaching and rural revitalisation fieldwork. What stayed with him was that change went well beyond new roads: public facilities, education, living standards and jobs were all improving. In Sanmen county in Taizhou, Zhejiang, he saw modern farming and rural development effectively combined. Across these places, he found the same thread: change was organised around what people need.

His doctoral work returns to the same question from different angles. One project examines what he calls unfinished bridges: the limits of China-Africa cultural exchange, and the slow arrival of Chinese audiovisual media in Sudan. Another takes Yiwu and Qingtian in Zhejiang as its field site and asks how media use shapes identity and cultural agency among people on the move. Language, he told the conference, is the key that unlocks a culture, and learning it is a means rather than an end.

Alongside his research, Abu works with the Zhejiang International Communication Center as a global ambassador for Chinese culture, a role that puts the arguments from his research in front of the camera. Ten years in, he describes the period as a continuous education, and says what he values most is the chance to understand the reasoning behind China's development. He wants to take what he has learned in China back to Sudan.