Hacker Cinema
Empire of Dust
2011 · Film · documentary · 77 min
Directed by Bram Van Paesschen
Lao Yang is head of logistics of the group. He is responsible for the equipment, building materials and food (mainly chickens) to arrive in the isolated Chinese prefab camp. The Congolese government was supposed to deliver these things but so far the team hasn't received anything. With Eddy (a Congolese man who speaks Mandarin fluently) as an intermediate, Lao Yang is forced to leave the camp and deal with local Congolese entrepreneurs, because without the construction materials the road works will cease. What follows is an endless, harsh, but absurdly funny roller coaster of negotiations and misunderstandings, as Lao Yang learns about the Congolese way of making deals.
9 positive2 neutralfrom 11 commenters
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13 comments on Hacker News
I recommend the documentary "Empire of Dust" if you would like learn more about the difficulties of doing business in africa.
It's a reference to a movie called "Empire of Dust" where a chinese-led team has a hard time building infrastructure in Africa.
Whether or not some third world country is worth developing is an economic question, not a moral one. And even if it is, the question of whether or not you will be able to monetize that relationship by the end of it is another one. What the chinse are doing now is basically IMF-style debt trapping of other nations, which doesn't seem like a successful strategy historically.
The bottom line is that if the natives don't want to cooperate with whatever civilization you're building, it's not going to work out. Look at what happened to the USA in afganistan (and pretty much every empire that stepped foot in there). I don't think that's racist, I think it is pretty optimistic outlook towards the sovereignty of nations.
There is a really great movie called Bitter Lake about this, by Adam Curtis.
There a great documentary called Empire of Dust from 2011 that follows Chinese engineers building roads in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
https://m.imdb.com/title/tt2148945/
When it gets mentioned online it mostly seems to be racists suggesting Africans are inferior, partly based on the Chinese engineer's frustration with local customs and graft and labour market.
But I found it quite humanising of both the African and Chinese people featured. The director is Belgian, which controlled the region up until independence 50 years before filming.
lol. Sounds like typical developing nation defeatism .
I am doing it right now in a developing nation.
I settled here on Hispaniola in 2007.
I am working and living right now in Haiti and the Dominican Republic. We’re building up new infrastructure in agriculture, education, and startup incubation. We have already launched a couple of successful ventures.
Here are not the least stable places, but they’re hardly the most stable either. But the rewards are huge for those that can stomach the risks.
Anyone who wants to try this needs to watch and internalise the film “empire of dust” (2013). It’s A documentary about how to not succeed in a developing nation.
There’s basically zero competition at the early stages because, like you, no one thinks you can do anything.
My kids have established a beachhead in Mauritius and northern India, and we are looking at Madagascar and some demographically collapsing areas in the eastern United States as a possible next step.
Some of my favourites that I did not find mentioned here, the topics might not be that interesting but I appreciate these documentaries for the very "real" human interactions in them. (I am not sure how to word it better:
Japan: A Story of Love and Hate - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1401179/ Following a japanase salaryman throughout his every day life
Empire of Dust - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2148945/ Chinese company is building railways in Democratic Republic Kongo, documentary follows the chinese head of Logistics and his "partner" who is an congolese that speaks fluent mandarin
I'm new here - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7573428/?ref_=nm_knf_t4 African buisnessmen trying to make buisness in china
Invisible - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0468496/ Very personal and intimate documentary of the everyday life of a group of heroin users in Sofia Bulgaria
Pakistan's Hidden Shame - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4173938/ From IMDB: A look into the sexual abuse suffered by the children living in the North-Western city of Peshawar in Pakistan.
A tough watch, comparably tough to An Act of Killing. I cried
Also I can recommended everything by Louis Theroux and to some degree Channel 5, if that qualifies as a documentary. I'd say that kind of content are more reportages, if I were to make a distinction
I can't edit on mobile otherwise I would have, but...
A very related work, if assuming the "imperialist" interpretation of The White Man's Burden, is the documentary Empire of Dust[0]. In this, a Chinese man is sent to a region in Africa to help build up various capabilities and the subsequent philosophical and practical issues that arise. I highly recommend it, but only if you (the watcher) can set aside your preexisting notions on the topics addressed.
[0]: (hopefully this works) https://vimeo.com/371805969
It baffles me that "poor people being mistreated by large corporations" is such a non-story for American media, while "poor people being mistreated by large corporations that make EVs or iPhones" is such a recurring theme, to the extent that it seems it's the iPhones or the EVs that are the issue, rather than the mistreatment.
The optimistic take is that the author is trying to motivate the people who already care about "saving the planet" to also care about exploited workers, though I would have hoped for more constructive suggestions on how to help if that was the case.
The pessimistic take is that this is just a long form essay version of a YouTube thumbnail with a shocked face on it, randomly pressing emotional buttons to attract attention and using any random psychological lever that seems to work.
If this article interested you, I'd recommend the 2011 documentary, Empire of Dust about Chinese engineers working to build roads in the Congo for their mines in this area. Fascinating look at the human side of this from both the Chinese and Congolese perspective:
https://m.imdb.com/title/tt2148945/
> Lao Yang and Eddy both work for a company called CREC (Chinese Railway Engineering Company). They have just set up camp near the remote mining town of Kolwezi in the Katanga province of the RDC. The goal of the company i..
The Chinese invest in African (sic) for minerals etc. they bring in their own workers (why do they do this if African wages are lower?).
This.
There's a most excellent documentary on the inroads the Chinese have industrially made in Africa called Empire of Dust (2011)[1] thats eminently watchable.[2][3][4]
Even going back a decade and more, the Chinese not only brought their own machinery, trucks, heavy and light equipment of all kinds down to nuts and bolts but also their own manpower for everything but the most menial of tasks for which they employed the local populace. This shows how unreliable or qualifiedly unworthy the Chinese deemed the skilled population in their host countries & how inefficient local governments were in furnishing them with basic skills.
[1]
Empire of Dust (2011)
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2148945/
[2]
EMPIRE OF DUST - TRAILER
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkEqI3_J4xg
[3]
Empire of Dust China in Africa Mirror
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LSuZGlqL34
[4]
It's all so....tiresome.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W9LaHualx-s
I think it is highly unlikely due to the chinese culture and how they view africans. There is a very good documentary called empire of dust that gives a good hindsight of the culture clash: https://youtu.be/1a-QpyF7rNc
The cultural mixing thing is a modern western fantasy of the elites, not shared at all by a majority of the world.
I do recommend watching the documentary in its entirety but there's also an interview with the director that addresses some of the themes in this thread.
https://filmmakermagazine.com/35197-empire-of-dust-an-interview-with-bram-van-paesschen/
There's a good documentary about Chinese infrastructure work in Africa called "Empire of Dust" which can be found on YouTube and similar sites.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2148945/
It appears to be popular with racists (at least going by the YouTube comments) because the middle-class Chinese engineers are needing to cope with very poor tribal workers who are not quite on board with the concept of the 9-5 culture but I felt the film itself humanised all sides and I was particularly touched by one scene where the engineers try to decide what to do about a worker who has damaged some bit of equipment that he wouldn't be able to afford to repair.
Generally made me feel good about the future of humanity.
Does this open up any investment or business opportunities?
I feel like the shipping and railroad industry is enormous and impenetrable, but there must be some smaller opportunities in here. Even if it's something sort of intangible, like "increasing transparency and fighting corruption". Because you know some percentage of this money went into the wrong pockets.
If you were just a programmer from a western country, how would you even begin to get started in developing markets? Not just this railway project, but Africa and Asia in general. I'm reading things like this [1]:
> China, India and the rest of the developing world will eclipse the west in a dramatic shift in the balance of economic power over the next 50 years.
So I want to be where the growth is happening. How do I do that? Do I need millions of dollars before I can achieve anything? Should I learn Mandarin, Hindi, or Swahili? In the past, I would have had to visit some of these countries and talk to some local entrepreneurs. Now I can just do my own research, meet people online, and have Skype calls. There's really no need to travel in order to find opportunities.
EDIT: I just watched the "Empire of Dust" documentary... That's really eye-opening. I hate to think about how much all of those workers are being paid. Even the Chinese managers. I guess business is business, and they just pay as little as possible. It also seems like it is very difficult to get anything done.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/datablog/2012/nov/09/developing-economies-overtake-west-2050-oecd-forecasts
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0C4_88ub_M
Documentary from 2011 on the topic, Empire of Dust: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0C4_88ub_M