China News Service, Beijing, September 10th. Question: Why is the Nile TV Confucius Classroom called the “Academy without Walls”?
——Exclusive interview with Liu Yuanqing, Chinese Director of Nile TV Confucius Classroom
China News Service reporter Han Hui
Egypt is the first Arab and African country to establish diplomatic relations with the People's Republic of China. 2026 marks the 70th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between China and Egypt. In Cairo, there is an independent Confucius Classroom located at Nile Television, a subsidiary of the Egyptian state-owned Media Authority. The classroom has broadcast about 500 programs in the past 10 years, with an average annual viewership of about 900,000 people.
How was the Nile TV Confucius Classroom born? Why is it called "Academy without Walls"? What cultural genes can the Chinese and Egyptian civilizations learn from each other? How does "Confucius Classroom" tell Chinese stories well? Recently, Liu Yuanqing, the Chinese director of the Nile TV Confucius Classroom, accepted an exclusive interview with China News Service's "East-West Question" to explain this.
The interview transcript is summarized as follows:
Reporter from China News Service: Under what background was the Nile TV Confucius Classroom born? What audiences is it mainly targeted at, and what are the distinctive features of the program’s presentation?
Liu Yuanqing: Where the media is, that’s where the audience is. Egypt is known as the "Hollywood of the Middle East" and was one of the first countries in the Arab world to launch television. Setting up a Chinese class here is equivalent to standing on one of the loudest platforms in the Arab world.
As China-Egypt economic, trade and people-to-people exchanges continue to deepen, more and more Egyptian young people want to learn Chinese. In 2012, Nile TV started broadcasting Chinese teaching programs; in 2015, the Confucius Classroom jointly organized by Beijing Language and Culture University and the Egyptian State-owned Media Authority was unveiled, with the program broadcast via satellite to 22 Arab countries.
Its feature is "speaking Chinese in Arabic", which integrates language knowledge points into daily life scenes. Even viewers who do not learn Chinese can watch it as a cultural program. There is no roster of students in the class. Turn on the TV and everyone is a student. In recent years, the program has further expanded to social media short video platforms, and the communication carriers have continued to iterate. The goal of spreading Chinese and showing the real China has never changed.
China News Service reporter: From your experience in contacting Arab audiences, what kind of China do they most want to know about? What content resonates most easily?
Liu Yuanqing: The Egyptian people yearn for China, but the mutual understanding between the people still needs to be further deepened.
The Chinese Spring Festival family reunion is highly consistent with the emotional core of the Egyptian Eid al-Fitr festival and can easily arouse resonance. Macroscopic data that is divorced from life scenes is difficult for the audience to remember. Cross-cultural resonance is often not about accepting new knowledge, but seeing oneself in other people's life narratives.
In the era of short videos, this feature is even more obvious, and our classroom has a deep understanding of this. After the program was edited into short videos and put online on social platforms, what touched us most was not just the playback data, but the interaction in the comment area: some viewers left messages using the newly learned "Hello" and "Thank you", and some netizens asked about the update time. The audience is not just passively "watching the program", but is interacting with the people on the screen. What the Arab people want to know is not a conceptual, abstract China, but a China rooted in real life.
China News Service Reporter: Why is the Nile TV Confucius Classroom called the “Academy without Walls”? What do you understand by "no walls"?
Liu Yuanqing: Compared with traditional offline face-to-face teaching, our Chinese teaching program is praised as a "college without walls" because of its flexibility and freedom from time and space restrictions.
What impressed me the most over the years were the "students" who had never entered a classroom: taxi drivers read along while waiting for guests, housewives studied while doing housework, and retired people watched it for half an hour every day. They have never registered as students, but they are the most dedicated learners.
Traditional classrooms rely on examinations, certificates and other institutional constraints to maintain teaching order; the audience in front of the screen does not assume any obligations, and watching is entirely voluntary. Therefore, "no walls" is not only a change in the form of communication, but also an innovation in educational logic: we can no longer rely on "must listen", but must be "worthy of your listening". This is a challenge brought by open communication, and it is also a proposition we face in our daily work.
Reporter from China News Service: China and Egypt both have ancient civilizations. What cultural genes do you think exist for mutual learning between Chinese and Egyptian civilizations?
Liu Yuanqing: Both Chinese and Egyptian civilizations regard people as beings in groups. Xunzi proposed that "one cannot live without a group"; the famous Arab historical philosopher Ibn Khaldun, who was born in the 14th century, also left similar insights. The Chinese character "benevolence" consists of "人" and "二". Arabic culture also attaches great importance to the maintenance of family ties, and the two ideas are logically connected.
The exchanges between the two major civilizations can be traced back more than a thousand years. Du Huan, a traveler in the Tang Dynasty, traveled in the Arab region for more than ten years and wrote "Jing Xing Ji" when he returned home, leaving behind the earliest first-hand account of Chinese people's observation of the Arab world. Later, the papermaking technology originated in China gradually spread westward, helping the Arab world to translate foreign classics on a large scale. In the Ming and Qing Dynasties, Chinese scholars such as Wang Daiyu used Chinese language and concepts to explain Arabic culture, and the two ideas were in dialogue through mutual translation.
An ancient Arabic proverb says, "If you seek knowledge, even if you are as far away as China." In the past, one had to travel thousands of miles to seek knowledge, but now one can come into contact with Chinese language and culture by turning on the TV or scrolling through short videos.
China News Service reporter: What new characteristics will the “China fever” in Arab countries present? In the future, how will "Confucius Classroom" tell Chinese stories well?
Liu Yuanqing: In Egypt, the “China fever” is visible and tangible. Chinese dramas and mini-series have become popular on the Arab Internet, and the Arabic version of "Mountains and Seas" has appeared on prime time TV in Egypt; Chinese brand cars have topped the monthly sales list of Egyptian passenger cars; domestically produced mobile phones and cross-border online shopping have entered the homes of ordinary people, and Chinese milk tea has also become a trendy choice for young people in Cairo.
In the future, the focus of "China fever" will shift from simply obtaining information to connecting people. As the high-quality Belt and Road Initiative deepens and becomes more concrete, the Chinese language has real development opportunities, which is its tool attribute; the channels through which people understand China have shifted from media reports to living individuals, which is the attribute of the relationship carrier; the motivation for learning Chinese has shifted from "understanding what the other party says" to "wanting to be accepted by the other party", which is the identity attribute of the relationship.
This change also reshapes Chinese international communication teaching. Extending from the large TV screen to the digital space, we are not simply putting textbooks on the screen, but putting "people" on the screen. I have three experiences in telling Chinese stories well. First, telling more about ordinary people and their daily lives, and describing a day in the life of a Chinese courier, can make the Egyptian audience feel that "the Chinese are just like us" more than piling up data; achievements must be talked about, but they must fall into the lives of ordinary people. Second, communication should be turned into communication. If the audience asks questions in the comment area, we will answer them in the next issue. The curiosity of the audience is the best question list. Third, let more real people come to the stage. Teachers from China and Egypt came to the camera to share their personal experiences with the Chinese language and China. The vivid and real faces of the people are more infectious than all kinds of promotional videos.
The next step for "Academy Without Walls" is to strive to become an "academy with a face" so that "China" is no longer just a country name in the Arab audience's perception, but a group of ordinary people who can feel it and have warmth.
