Since 2010, Jehovah’s Witness Christians in Zambia have been intensively studying spoken and written Mandarin, establishing new Mandarin-language congregations, and evangelising Chinese migrants. To make their faith more relatable to the migrants they seek to convert, Witnesses demonstrate the biblical ori…

On 10 March 2023, the Confucius Institute (CI) at Zimbabwe’s oldest and premier university, the University of Zimbabwe, celebrated its fifteenth anniversary with glitz and fun. Dressed in Chinese costumes, students sang in Chinese and displayed various forms of Chinese art and culture, highlighting their l…

China’s complex linguistic landscape reveals deep tensions between the state’s push for the use of Mandarin and the preservation of minority languages like Tibetan. As Mandarin is promoted as a neutral language essential for social mobility, Tibetan communities are caught in a struggle to maintain their li…

‘We used to have teachers from Taiwan,’ said Tai, the principal of a middle school in northern Thailand. He told me most schools in the ethnic Chinese villages in northern Thailand still insist on teaching traditional Chinese characters, as used in Taiwan, ‘though some do consider teaching simplified…

‘You walawala ta guolai [Tell him to come here]!’ When I first started conducting research at a construction site run by a Chinese state-owned construction company in the Western Region of Ghana, I found that language barriers were causing communication problems, often leading to misunderstandings and conf…

It was a Friday in early June 2024, one hour after the Salat al-Jumu‘ah prayer. The only thing as intense as the ultraviolet radiation was the hustle and bustle of El-Abasseya Square, one of the busiest public transport hubs in Greater Cairo. At one edge of the square, two bulky buildings shielded the alle…

According to the British Council, one in four English-language learners globally is Chinese, for a total of 400 million students. That number may be massive, but it fails to capture just how pervasive English is in China, not only within schooling, but also in everyday conversations, public signage, and fa…

Hiếu Minh Ngô, also known as Hieu PC, was born in Gia Lai, Vietnam. His involvement in hacking led him down a path of identity theft and cybercrime, resulting in his arrest and a 13-year prison sentence in the United States for stealing and selling the data of more than 200 million Americans. Upon completi…

In July 2024, ByteDance’s Douyin app—the Chinese version of TikTok—introduced a system through which live streamers are ranked on a six-tier scale of ‘health points’ (健康分 jiankangfen), with the platform now deducting points if live streamers commit offences including unhealthy behaviour, misinformation, an…

‘I’m getting good at dealing with these Chinese guys,’ Grace (a pseudonym, as are all other names of people and businesses in this essay) told me one day after joking around with a customer. Grace was one of two full-time Kenyan employees working the counter at Duck Express, a small takeaway Chinese restau…