Is China a Success while India is a Failure?

Abstract

China is a success and India is a failure. That conclusion-or is it an unexamined assumption?-has dominated comparative studies of world's two most populous nations since establishment of People's Republic of China and Republic of India in aftermath of World War II. Looking at a glitzy Shanghai skyline in 2002, an Indian busi ness reporter, worried how Indian nationalism leads to a pooh-poohing of advanced nations and a commitment to building on ancient Indian glories, anxiously projects maybe 21st century really does belong to China.' It is an important fact that, from beginning of China's economic reforms in 1978-79 until 1991, when India launched itself on a similar course, China's economy grew to double size of India's. Still, informed ana lysts of China see behind glitz to a more somber reality, including a crisis of govern ance, the pathologies of both political stagnation of ... Brezhnev's Soviet Union and crony capitalism of Suharto's Indonesia.2 What is it that people compare when they pit India against China? For many Chinese, it is a matter of Confucianism versus Hinduism. The Chinese assumption is that Confucianism is sober, rational, and practical, and Hinduism is mystical, irrational, and otherworldly, which is why China succeeds and India fails. Chinese ness is superior to Indianness. The Chinese know that China is a success and India is a failure. It is this presupposition that I will explore in this article. It is merely a presupposi tion, definitely not a fact. To Chinese-even in Hong Kong-it is a given that China has succeeded and India has failed. If one tells a Chinese that Chinese popular culture basically is Buddhist and that this Bud dhism came from India, one immediately is con tradicted. A strong Chinese tree cannot result from a weak Indian seed. One tends to be told that Indian Buddhism, which was soft, was trans formed by Chinese culture into something hard, such that a this-worldly Chinese Buddhism has little in common with an other-worldly Indian Buddhism, a pre-Hindu source of India's failure rooted deep in its civilizational essence. Such civilizational binaries, however, are projections of prejudices, not explanations of rates of growth. 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. Actually, when Japan began to rise in its Meiji era, Japanese saw their country as a land of status-conscious wastrels. They therefore copied European bank ing institutions and savings incentives. Any peo ple can do it. What is decisive are policies and institutions.