Journal of African Media Studies - China–Africa Language and Cultural Exchange, Dec 2025

This study explores how Egyptian audiences interpret Sino-Egyptian cultural content in livestreams featuring imperial tomb symbolism from both Egypt and China. Using Hall’s encoding/decoding model, this article examines how viewers negotiate meaning, compare traditions and construct cultural understanding in a digital, cross-cultural setting. Data were collected in 2025 through written interviews, participant observation and digital trace analysis among Egyptian learners of Chinese. Results show that audiences actively identified both shared themes – especially beliefs about the afterlife – and cultural distinctions, such as Egypt’s emphasis on individual immortality vs. China’s focus on lineage and social continuity. Viewers used comparative strategies to map similarities, build equivalences and deepen interpretation. Interactive livestream features such as chat, Q&A and visual presentations encouraged collaborative meaning-making and interpretive community formation. Overall, the study demonstrates how digital media can enable reflective, participatory engagement with cultural heritage and highlights the active role of audiences in shaping cross-cultural understanding.

As a new type of media, digital platforms are an organic system of mutual construction and symbiosis with established forms of cultural communication and knowledge transmission. Driven by the global wave of digitization, international Chinese language communication has presented new opportunities and encountered numerous challenges. Based on theories of digital embodied cognition and cultural cognitive schema (CCS), this study focuses on Nigerian Chinese learners, adopting a mixed-methods design. It selects digital platforms, such as Xiaohongshu (RedNote), as the empirical field. It combines quantitative data with semi-structured in-depth interviews to systematically investigate Chinese language acquisition and cultural adaptation in the context of digital platforms. The study found that informal learning behaviours such as short video imitation and comment interaction can effectively promote the internalization of linguistic structures, which verifies the applicability of digital embodied cognition theory in cross-language acquisition scenarios. It also found that Xiaohongshu (RedNote) breaks the time and space limitations of traditional language learning through the closed-loop mechanism of ‘content co-creation–instant feedback–community reinforcement’, highlighting the value of social media as a multifunctional language learning ecosystem. The coupling effect of the platform’s ‘interest-driven content recommendation mechanism’ and ‘CCS’ drives users to realize the transition from ‘information receivers’ to ‘content co-creators’, thus transforming cultural differences into cross-cultural communication dynamics. These mechanisms provide new paths and insights for the digital transformation of international Chinese language education. This study enriches the theoretical dialogue among media, language acquisition and cross-cultural communication in the digital era. It provides a theoretical basis and a practical, digitally enhanced path for deepening exchanges through mutual understanding between China and Africa.

A language’s international image impacts significantly on second language learning motivations. Our study investigates Cameroonian students’ perceptions of the Chinese language’s international image. Africa is the fastest-growing region for Chinese language education, so understanding such perceptions is especially relevant amidst deepening China–Africa cooperation and cultural exchange. Drawing on language image planning theories and the Chinese language’s international image, this study used a mixed qualitative and quantitative research method to examine Cameroonian students’ perceptions of the Chinese language’s international image. A questionnaire survey was administered to 302 Cameroonian students and in-depth interviews were conducted with six students. The findings reveal that Cameroonian students generally have a positive perception of the Chinese language’s international image, primarily influenced by China’s economic and technological advancements. Students particularly value the economic benefits of learning Chinese, demonstrating a strong sense of agency by viewing this as a key to better employment and career development. Despite this positive outlook, Chinese is perceived as a difficult language to learn, with the writing of Chinese characters (also known as Hanzi) seen as a major obstacle – although few empirical studies in the African context have been conducted to substantiate this claim. Experiences in China and work related to China or the Chinese language can positively shape perceptions of the Chinese language’s image. The study indicates that Cameroonian students’ views on the Chinese language reflect not only their perception but also broader dynamics of China’s rapid development and the strengthening of ties between China and Africa. This research contributes to a deeper understanding of complex factors shaping the Chinese language’s image in an African context.

Chinese calligraphy, a classic symbol of Chinese culture, embodies rich cultural thought and aesthetic sensibilities. This study examines how South African participants perceive and interpret Chinese calligraphy within a cross-cultural context, using Charles Sanders Peirce’s semiotic framework. Through online focus groups and in-depth interviews, it explores participants’ aesthetic evaluations and cultural perceptions, revealing both disconnected responses, such as misunderstandings, confusion and rejection, and affirmative responses, including curiosity, resonance and appreciation. Feedback from participants has further shaped a cominterpretant, a shared understanding that emerged through processes of modification, blending and re-creation. The findings highlight the merging, empathy, integration and mutual construction of Chinese and South African cultures. By analysing the symbolic interpretation and emotional experience of Chinese calligraphy, this study highlights the commonalities, differences and points of integration in the aesthetic and cultural perceptions of the two countries. It expands the space for Chinese–South African cultural exchanges based on intersubjectives and mutual construction, offering refreshing insights to enable enhanced cross-cultural understanding and mutual learning.

Amid the ongoing wave of globalization, interest in learning Chinese continues to grow across Africa, driving an increasing demand for Chinese language education and fostering more dynamic cross-cultural exchanges. However, the teaching of Chinese as a second language faces the dual challenge of creating innovative teaching methods and enhancing the effectiveness of cultural dissemination. This article, grounded in the theory of cross-cultural resonance through artistic media, examines Chinese language education in Nigeria as a case study to conduct an in-depth analysis of the practical effectiveness of singing-based teaching methods in Nigerian Chinese language education. The study focuses on Chinese language learners in Nigeria over the past five years, using a mixed research design that combines quantitative experimental data with semi-structured in-depth interviews. It constructs a three-stage teaching paradigm of ‘phoneme perception – phrase memory – pragmatic transfer’ and reveals its multimodal synergistic mechanism: musical rhythm enhances learners’ phonetic perception sensitivity by reinforcing the neural encoding of tones. The repetitive structure of lyrics promotes the consolidation of procedural memory, enabling natural and fluent language output and the musical expression of cultural imagery, leveraging the effects of embodied cognition, which facilitates the deep internalization and contextual application of cultural schemes, further stimulating learners’ cross-cultural identity. The research results indicate that the singing teaching method can enhance learners’ oral expression abilities, cultural understanding accuracy and pragmatic flexibility while effectively reducing the cognitive load associated with tone acquisition and accelerating the extraction and application of cross-cultural concepts. This study validates the optimizing effect of multimodal teaching, represented by the singing teaching method, on second language acquisition, providing theoretical support and practical references for constructing a Chinese teaching model with cross-cultural adaptability and also promoting Sino-African cultural exchange.