Is China a success while India is a failure? World Affairs - Find Articles

Is China a success while India is a failure? World Affairs - Find Articles

After all, for many centuries, both India and China were far ahead of Europe economically.

Sadly, some Indians accept this notion of Confucians as uniquely capable of disciplined frugality and saving, as if India were not also a great commercial civilization.
Freedom, both in the sense of knowledge as a basis for rational choice and of physical mobility as a capacity that could be realized or blocked, is central to well-being. The Chinese hinterland villager in the Mao era, limited in information by a single political line, either believed, wrongly, that all Chinese were equal in condition and living better than the supposedly exploited and immiserated of Taiwan or was frustrated and outraged at being kept locked in the equivalent of an apartheid caste society. The Indian villager, joining an opposition political party, protest movement, or exodus to the city, had capabilities painfully denied to the impoverished Mao-era Chinese villager. In many ways, the Indian villager was better off.

Although all societies are wasteful, it may be that Leninist production numbers uniquely obscure how extraordinarily much of that production never usefully reaches an end-user or consumer, how stupendously much is wasted on the courtly lifestyle of the parasitic and large official stratum of feudal-like rulers, how much goes to the military and especially to the many secret polices with no gain--indeed, with great loss--for individual security.

The poor hate the corrupt gains of the coddled rich. Chinese grow nostalgic about the past and misremember and romanticize it as a way to criticize the lack of national health care today, just as the brilliant and well-meaning Professor Sen and others among the well-meaning Indian left romanticized Mao-era primitive equality. Today's poor in China, like the nostalgic left in India, blame China's market-oriented reforms for its hideous and growing gap between rich and poor.

That is, the issue is not a democratic political system as such, but, rather, India's entrenched political interests that benefit from the Leninist command economy, the "license raj," and conservative elites in some of north India's most populous and, therefore, electorally powerful provinces. They have had the political clout to block needed growth and poverty-reducing reform.

In fact, the causes of growing inequality in reform-era China lie in the continuation of Mao-era policies and priorities. They are entrenched in powerful identities, interests, and institutions.

In India, in contrast, the strongest supporters of its democracy are the poorest people. One can debate the diverse sources of this stabilizing legitimation of Indian democracy, assessing the contribution of Gandhianism, policies of positive discrimination, lower caste political mobilization in a second surge of democratization

In Indian nationalism, Indians must be "wary of opening the economy to foreign business for fear of repeating the experience of the East India Company, whose merchants had become rulers" and practiced "extreme protectionism," thereby locking India into one technological moment of industry, incapable of borrowing the knowledge that permitted continuous upgrading to standards of global excellence. Since independence, fearful that market openness meant dependency on imperialism, India has wounded itself, subsidizing waste and producing shoddy goods, rejecting an opening to world markets that rapidly expanded wealth in East and Southeast Asia.

Indians instead clung to the "Nehruvian developmental model ... based on import substituting industrialization leading to self-reliance" while damning export-oriented industrialization as an American "imperial" conspiracy to keep developing nations as "client and protege states" who are forced to "follow the footsteps" of an exploitative America.

the big political obstacles to India's rapid rise come from the nationalistic rejection of openness.

when European ships reached India in the sixteenth century, "India was enormously productive, wealthy and densely populated.... Indian ports and shipping had for centuries been tied into the Arabian Sea, Red Sea, and Mediterranean system on one side and into the Bay of Bengal, Straits of Malaka, and China Sea on the other." A decentralized and open India absorbed advanced technologies, and "Indian diamonds, pepper, handwoven cotton and silk textiles, and other commodities kept their old markets and found new ones.... Dutch purchases of textiles in Bengal in the late seventeenth century likely generated 100,000 new jobs for the region." India was a beneficiary of the expansion of the world market, Andre Gunder Frank concluded in 1996, "earlier and more than ... Europe." (25) Should one not imagine premodern India as a global market leader?

A democratic India, therefore, has economic opportunities denied to the Chinese people by the ruling Communist Party's dictatorial system. Democracy is not now and never was an obstacle to growth.

Compare institutions - democracy versus dictatorship, matters of political institutions, leadership, and will.

finds Tu Weiming, America's leading neo-Confucian. India is a vibrant democracy, a civilization where religious vitality and societal dynamism flourish together, and China "suffers from an inability to understand religion as an integral part of the complex modernizing process," (36) such that China should "take from" India, understood as one of China's "reference societies." (37)

It is mind-boggling that people could ever consider this abnormal China that represses its people's capacities a success and a vibrant and democratic India a failure.

Long article definitely worth spending time on. Merits a thorough read.