The transformation has been so dramatic that a little fishing village called Shenzhen has become, in a decade, one of the world’s largest and most prosperous modern cities. The rows of massed bicycles across Beijing have given way to choking fleets of spanking new cars; the dull grey Mao tunics have been replaced by colourful clothes of the latest styles and cut, made (or at least copied) in China itself; the supermarkets overflow with consumer goods of every conceivable description, again mainly made in China and exported to the rest of the world, including to those countries that designed these products in the first place. When I first visited Beijing in 1997, I expected to see a version of New Delhi; I was quite unprepared for the difference of kind, not just of degree, that confronted me there, let alone in bustling, sleek Shanghai. China’s prosperous cities are First World conurbations, bearing little resemblance to those of the typical developing country (which is what China’s leaders still claim their country is). To an Indian visitor, this is startling, and not a little humbling.
Institutions are acquiring new habits and traditions undreamt of in the Maoist past. A few years ago, I was invited to speak at Beijing University, and was presented with a handsome red-and-white university tie. When I returned to the UN headquarters in New York I made it a point to wear my new tie at a meeting with a senior Chinese official who I knew had graduated from Peking University. He made no comment about the tie, so I was provoked to ask him, ‘Don’t you recognize what I’m wearing?’ No, he replied, and then it struck me: when he had attended Peking University, there had been no such thing as an official university tie, for the simple reason that no one wore one!
Even traditions are being manufactured in the country. Change has come to China, and it’s a stunning degree of change. Instead of being hemmed in behind tightly controlled borders, Chinese are now free to travel and study abroad, and almost a million have done so in the last three decades, including some 130,000 who are currently studying in foreign countries, acquiring skills that most will bring back to their native land. The private sector, unknown in Mao’s day, bids fair to rival the state-owned enterprises that were the initial engines of China’s growth and prosperity. It is not all good news. China is also more polluted than ever before, with air unfit to breathe, visibility in Beijing shockingly limited by smog, and rivers poisoned by toxic effluents. It is also a much more unequal society, an irony for a country that still calls itself a people’s republic and is ruled by a communist party.
This is admittedly a sketchy summary of a complex reality, but it serves as a platform for a reflection on two aspects of the rise of China and India: first, the question of commonalities, competition and complementarities between the two of them and, second, the risk of conflict.
First, commonalities, complementarities and competition. It has become rather fashionable these days, in bien-pensant circles in the West, to speak of India and China in the same breath. These are the two big countries said to be taking over the world, the new contenders for global eminence after centuries of Western domination, the Oriental answer to generations of Occidental economic success. Three recent books even explicitly twin the two countries: Forbes magazine correspondent Robyn Meredith’s The Elephant and the Dragon: The Rise of India and China and What It Means for All of Us, Harvard business professor Tarun Khanna’s Billions of Entrepreneurs: How China and India Are Reshaping Their Futures — and Yours and Raghav Bahl’s Superpower? The Amazing Race between China’s Hare and India’s Tortoise. All three books, though different in scope and tone, see the recent rise of India and China as literally shifting the world’s economic and political tectonic plates. Some even speak of ‘Chindia’, as if the two are joined at the hip in the international imagination.
Personally, count me among the sceptics. It’s not just that, aside from the fact that both countries occupy a rather vast landmass called ‘Asia’, they have very little in common. It’s also that the two countries are already at very different stages of development — China started its liberalization in 1978, a good thirteen years before India, shot up faster, hit double-digit growth when India was still hovering around 5 per cent and, with compound growth, has put itself in a totally different league from India, continuing to grow faster from a larger base. And it’s also that the two countries’ systems are totally dissimilar. If China wants to build a new six-lane expressway, it can bulldoze its way past any number of villages in its path; in India, if you want to widen a two-lane road, you could be tied up in court for a dozen years over compensation entitlements. When China built the Three Gorges Dam, it created a 660-kilometre-long reservoir that necessitated the displacement of a staggering 2 million people, all accomplished in fifteen years without a fuss in the interests of generating electricity; when India embarked on the Narmada Dam project, aiming to bring irrigation, drinking water and power to millions, it had to spend thirty-nine years (so far) fighting environmental groups, human rights activists and advocates for the displaced all the way to the Supreme Court, while still being thwarted in the streets by the protesters from non-governmental organizations like the Narmada Bachao Andolan (Save Narmada Movement). That is how it should be; India is a fractious democracy, China is not. But as an Indian, I do not wish to pretend we can compete in the global growth stakes with China.
In fact, if anyone wanted confirmation that twinning India with China is, to put it mildly, premature, one has only to look at the medals tally at the Beijing Olympics. China proudly ranked first, with 51 gold medals and a total of 100. You have to strain your eyes past such twinkling little stars of the global family as Jamaica, Belarus, war-torn Georgia, collapsing Zimbabwe and even what used to be called Outer Mongolia before stumbling across India in 50th place, with precisely three medals, one gold and two bronze.
This is not, in fact, a surprise. Whereas China has set about systematically striving for Olympic success since it re-entered global competition after years of isolation, India has remained complacent about its lack of sporting prowess. Where China lobbied for and won the right to host the Olympics within two decades of its return to the Games, India rested on its laurels after hosting the Asian Games in Delhi in 1982, so that it is now considered further behind in the competition for Olympic hosthood than it was two decades ago. Where China embarked on ‘Project 119’, a programme devised specifically to boost the country’s Olympic medal standings (the number 119 refers to the golds awarded at the Sydney Games of 2000 in such medal-laden sports as track and field, swimming, rowing, sailing and canoeing), Indians wondered if they would be able to crack the magic ceiling of two, the highest number of medals the country has ever won at this quadrennial exercise in international sporting machismo. Where China, seeing the number of medals awarded in kayaking, decided to create a team to master a sport hitherto unknown in the Middle Kingdom, India has not even lobbied successfully for the inclusion in the Games of the few sports it does play well (kabaddi, for instance, or polo, or cricket, which was played in the Olympics of 1900 and has been omitted since). Where China has maintained its dominance in table tennis and badminton, and developed new strengths in non-traditional sports like rowing and shooting, India has seen its once-legendary invincibility in field hockey fade with the introduction of Astroturf, to the point where its team even failed to qualify for the Beijing Olympics.