The Congo and China

Just watched an episode of Anthony Bourdain's Parts Unknown which touched on a connection that is shared, in my mind, between China and the Congo in the way both places are perceived by the world outside.

An eastern Congo city on the shore of Lake Kivu is the launch point for Bourdain's run to the Congo River, a part of the world brought into memory for many westerners through Joseph Conrad's The Heart of Darkness. The city of Goma, it is described by Bourdain's fixers, could be seen as a stand-in representative of the Congo's larger situation; surrounded by at least 8 different tribal militias battling for influence, everything from levels of danger to the availability of food and water fluctuate wildly from day to day, hour to hour. The culture is amazing, to Bourdain's main interest the food and people are amazing, but the Congo as it exists now can simply not sustain any type of sustained media attention--it's too crazy, it's by turns stable and unstable, the situation is too complicated. As a documentary filmmaker on the show describes, "you can't fit the Congo into 3 sentences on a nightly newscast."

I'm not the first person to note that China is best conceived--can only be conceived--by casual observers, journalists, policymakers, or anyone else by allowing for a tremendous amount of cognitive dissonance, for the existence simultaneously of contradictory information leading to contradictory conclusions. The "contradictions" thread on this blog is dedicated to fleshing out some examples. China is organized and built up in a way that, from the images I saw just now, is lightyears ahead of the Congo. It's problems, however, are well-documented, and its situation--political, economic, social--is just so incredibly complex. It is a place that cannot fit into 3 sentences on a nightly newscast, yet because of its rising importance this is what we try to do many evenings on CNN, NBC, ABC, and FOX News. It is a place that is convenient for western news outlets as it accommodates so many different 3 sentence wrap-ups, each of which can be substantiated in some way--made to mean something by different people, for different watchers, to different ends.

So what to do? Give up on understanding these places? Unlike the Congo, China at least has the benefit of rising clout as a growing global power. There are lots of economic and other incentives for everything from people-to-people exchanges to foreign investments that will continue to build greater understanding over the near term. Congo, to this point, has had no such luck. An interesting comparison: urban Chinese routinely lament the horrors of traveling home by train each Chinese New Year. The trains are packed, there's barely space to move, and tickets are difficult to get. One of the most heartbreaking parts of the Bourdain's program is when they visit an old Congolese railway station that used to be the hub of a route that went all around the country and then all the way down to South Africa. Now, there's no more locomotives, and no train transportation across the city, much less the country. At least in China, there are trains that exist that can be crowded in the first place. Appropriately, Bourdain ends the show describing the hope of the Congolese people in the face of a very uncertain future.