Kenza Wilks tells stories. Most recently they have been about people and places connected to an aluminium factory in central China.

Kenza, 25, has spent the past five months there, gathering insight into economic growth, societal change and other big issues that he shares in simple words with the readers of his newsletter, Through the Factory Window.

“I spend a lot of time having conversations with the workers in the factory, and trying to write and think about a different kind of coverage of China, one which differs from the sort of focus on Beijing and Shanghai, and China's major cities, but turns towards the interior in more of a serious way,” he explained.

It helps that people are naturally interested in him – as a 6ft 2in Black man, he’s an oddity.

“And if people ask you questions, you'll find that you can ask questions back,” he said. “I’m just someone who's spending time in China and sharing a blog with a little bit about my personal experiences.”

The handful of stories he has written are short, easy reads. For anyone who can’t be bothered to skim through, Kenza has included a voiceover.

One of his most recent focuses on what it was like to be in China as “an observer and an outsider” for one of the most important holidays in Chinese culture.

Colleagues peppered him with questions about his plans as work at the factory wound down for the annual 15-day break.

“Most ask what I’ll do when the presses close and the furnace doors shut. ‘What will you eat? Where will you go? Who will you see?’ It’s funny, their questions make me second-guess my resolve for staying behind, and with the factory slowly draining of workers and the snow settling in drifts, I can’t help but wonder why I haven’t already fled to the warmth of the south,” he wrote in A Chinese New Year.

“It took me a while to realise that the questions they asked weren’t really for me, but reflections of what the workers are looking forward to most; the family members they can’t wait to see, the journeys the will take, the dumplings they’ll fold, firecrackers set alight, the games they’ll play and the celebrations they’ll share.”

Before his undergraduate studies at King’s College in London, Kenza spent a year in Beijing, as a Confucius scholar. At Tsinghua University, he took a course on Chinese language and literature, which is where his interest in China “really began”.

In 2021, he was named Bermuda’s Rhodes Scholar.

“For my master's degree, I wrote my MPhil on Chinese traders in Dakar in Senegal. I spent a month collecting fieldwork in Dakar on these traders that have moved from Henan, this rural province in China, to West Africa, and were playing a really critical role in bringing Chinese goods into Senegal and spreading them to other countries from there.

“I found that to be a really interesting research project and sort of continue to pursue that kind of thing in the work that I'm doing.”

Henan is recognised as one of the cradles of Chinese civilisation. His work there is part of the Rhodes Service Year.

Scholars have the opportunity to pursue community-oriented projects related to their academic or professional interest with support from the Rhodes Trust.

“It's not the classic graduate scheme. I think the part that's been super interesting for me is that even though I'd spent a decent period of time in China before – I’d lived in Beijing for a full year between 2017 and 2018 – this experience has been really significantly different.”

He’s thrilled also to be able to share an experience unlike what’s typically focused on by western media.

“It’s about what the Chinese state is doing in Africa. Is it acting as a neocolonial power or not? What are broad trade relations between the United States and China and what does that mean for the world?

“And what I've tried to focus on a little bit more is what do individual human to human interactions tell us about these broader macro narratives?

“What can we understand about the China-Africa relationship through spending time interviewing individual Chinese migrants that happen to live in Dakar?

“I think it's a similar kind of motivation with what I'm doing now – thinking about what can the story of a singular aluminium factory tell us about broader themes of China's social and economic development.”

Despite his colleagues’ fears, Kenza’s first Chinese New Year wasn’t a bust. At the invitation of factory workers he jumped on a pedal bike to join them and their families, riding nearly 200 miles in ten days.

“Chinese New Year is an extended celebration in China. People often compare it as having the level of importance of Christmas holidays in Western cultures.

“Everybody has to go back to their home villages, it’s sort of the biggest mass migration event in the world and it happens every year in January, February,” he said.

“In the end I stayed with three different families, experiencing rural Chinese New Year traditions.

“The Chinese New Year experience typically is fairly similar to what we’d expect at Christmas. You meet with family, you eat well, you drink well.”

Mah-jong, a tile-based table game, was a favourite pastime; drinking was a skill he had to master and although proficient in Mandarin, the local dialect was a new challenge.

“Traditionally, you hand out red envelopes to kids which have cash in them; you go and visit the graves of your ancestors and you make sacrifices to them.

“And the way you do this, you burn this paper ‘money’ and sometimes leave cigarettes and alcohol as a gesture for previous generations as an important part of bringing in the new year.”

Much to the delight of children, fireworks are set off and sold everywhere as part of the celebrations.

“All the roadsides will be selling these pyrotechnics of various size and scale. In the villages there will be these kids running around with lighters setting off firecrackers. So there's just a lot of volume.

“One difference between our conception of new year’s, which has a countdown to midnight and then you set off the fireworks, in China the fireworks are pretty constant for at least five days.

“They rise slightly on [the actual] New Year but are pretty constant all of the evenings as soon as it gets dark.”

Most foreigners who visit China don’t see more than Beijing and the Great Wall, the Bund in Shanghai, the Terracotta Warriors and other major attractions. Kenza has been able to dive a bit deeper.

“What I really am so grateful for in this experience is that I've spent time in villages and towns, which Chinese people in China wouldn't recognise.

“And that's kind of the point of the newsletter – you're getting a glimpse through the factory window, you’re getting a different perspective on human stories and an understanding of where we can draw commonalities between what initially appears to be really very disparate experiences.”

• Read Through the Factory Window atkenzawilks.substack.com/