An examination of the Chinese and Indian education systems offers an opportunity to compare the world's two most populous countries, which share common, almost insurmountable, problems overcoming the legacies of foreign domination, semifeudalism, and educational underdevelopment' but which differ in their strategies of economic and educational development. At the time of independence in 1947 and liberation in 1949, India and China, respectively, faced the educational problems of massive illiteracy (approximately 85 percent of their adult populations); underdeveloped systems of basic education, which reached less than one-third of the relevant age group; and academic curricula that traditionally had served the narrow interests of domestic elites and foreign colonial powers. These problems, characteristic of most Third World countries, are magnified by the size of the populations of the two countries -China with 1.1 billion and India with 700 million; herculean efforts are required simply to feed and provide basic services to populaces that are increasing by more than 10 million per annum. In tackling these problems, China and India offer dramatic contrasts in their approaches to modernization. Since independence, India has continued within the capitalist mode, although the state plays a greater role in capital formation and investment than in most Western free-market economies; its political system is based on the English parliamentary and United States federal models of government; its strategy of human resource development has been incremental and accommodative, attempting to expand, extend, and democratize education without radically threatening the advantages of already privileged sectors of the society. Since liberation, China's approach to capital accumulation and distribution is best characterized as a command economy in which resources, both material and human, are largely allocated by nonmarket mechanisms;2 politically, China is a unitary and 'socialist state of the dictatorship of the proletariat' based on Marxism-Leninism-Mao