India - China: Relations And Developments

06-16-2006, 08:06 PM

Title: Is China a success while India is a failure?
Date: 9/22/2004;
Publication: World Affairs;
Author: Friedman, Edward

China is a success and India is a failure. That conclusion--or is it an unexamined assumption?--has dominated comparative studies of the world's two most populous nations since the establishment of the People's Republic of China and the Republic of India in the aftermath of World War II. Looking at a glitzy Shanghai skyline in 2002, an Indian business reporter, worried how Indian nationalism leads to a pooh-poohing of the advanced nations and a commitment to building on ancient Indian glories, anxiously projects "that maybe the 21st century really does belong to China." (1) It is an important fact that, from the 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 the size of India's. Still, informed analysts of China see behind the glitz to a more "somber reality," including a "crisis of governance," "the pathologies of both the political stagnation of ... Brezhnev's Soviet Union and the 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 tails. Chineseness 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 presupposition, 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 Buddhism came from India, one immediately is contradicted.

A strong Chinese tree cannot result from a weak Indian seed. One tends to be told that Indian Buddhism, which was soft, was transformed 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, the Japanese saw their country as a land of status-conscious wastrels. They therefore copied European banking institutions and savings incentives. Any people can do it. What is decisive are policies and institutions.

The essentialist binary privileging China over India is the presupposition of error after error. The Journal of Asian Studies, the prestigious organ of the Association for Asian Studies, ran a special issue during Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward from 1958-61, explaining how China had now met and transcended the challenges of rural misery while Indian villagers were still mired in poverty. As always, the question was how to explain the presumed Chinese success and Indian failure.

Yet, it turned out that Mao's Leap engendered the most murderous manmade famine in human history, causing at least thirty million premature deaths, some say more than forty million. One cannot be sure because Chinese statistics, especially the numbers given for the death toll for 1961, are neither credible nor transparent.

Yet, the binary of Chinese success and Indian failure is treated as a fact. Visitors to India see beggars all over the city streets. In China, you need a local friend to direct you to see the pains of the more than one hundred million rural people who have fled without legal documents to cities, with unschoolable street kids sent out to beg. China's Calcutta-like poverty is hidden away in the marginalized countryside. In India, it has exploded into the cities, a dynamic just beginning in China.

To be open to a realistic comparison of the performances of India and China, it is helpful to change the images in one's head that predetermine what the eyes see.

There were two other Mao-era famines after the Great Leap disaster. Picture each of the millions of victims of China's three deadly Mao-era famines:

QUOTEÂ An inhabitant of a Xinyang village reported at
Â that time. "I just came back from our native village....
Â Everyone in my family has starved to
Â death.... Only my aunt remains. Her son died
Â too....Â How can she go on living? ... In the
Â middle of one night, a pig so starved that it was
Â nothing but skin and bones rushed into her
Â courtyard. She shut the door at once. Then she
Â beat the hunger dazed pig to death. She
Â skinned the pig during the night and buried it.
Â She got up in the middle of the night, dug up
Â the pig and cooked a piece of it to eat. She did
Â not give any of it to her five-year-old son to eat
Â for fear that he would talk about it. Once they
Â found out, those who were still alive in the village
Â would come rushing in and threaten to kill
Â her. They would beat her to bring out the pig.
Â She looked at her son crying that he was hungry!
Â Mama, I'm hungry. Mama! This went on
Â until he died. (3) 

As a police-state dictatorship premised on fear and complicity, the truth did not and does not readily emerge from China. Progressive Indians, seeing their nation trapped in the dilemmas of its less-than-successful first five-year plans, persuaded themselves that India's failures came not from its Soviet Union-like command economy, which it shared with China, but from a bureaucratic, capitalist, landlord elite that exploited India's poor. Actually, in the Mao era, both China and India wounded themselves by entrenching a Soviet-style command economy and by seeking autarky. "In 1970, when inward-looking policies reigned supreme, the [Indian] ratio of trade in goods and services to GDP was a mere eight percent, the lowest in the world, but for China." (4)

That is, as disappointing as India's performance was, Mao-era China did even worse. Learning the truth about China's dictatorship and Mao's famine, however, did not, for most progressive Indian intellectuals, uproot misleading binaries of a good socialism (China) and a bad capitalism (India). Because the Chinese do not highlight their catastrophic experiences, outside analysts too easily overlook the most fundamental and awful realities. 

Given Marxist-influenced anticolonialist assumptions, leftist intellectuals in India kept criticizing Indian policies for not being as socialist as China's, even as Chinese died from Mao's utopian socialist dictatorial project. Indians trekked to China to seek the supposed secret of China's purported developmental success.

The presupposition was that (bourgeois) democracy could not compete with (proletarian) dictatorship. Yet India only escaped mass famine, as India's Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen has shown, because it was a democracy. 

In the 1960s, left Indian intellectuals were not alone in imagining Leninist socialism as superior to market-oriented democracies. It was an era in which thinking was shaped by the Soviet Sputnik's winning of the space rocket race and by America's defeat by Fidel Castro at the Bay of Pigs, followed by America's long and bloody involvement in an unwinnable war in Vietnam. American aid to India was "aimed at helping democratic India prevail over China in a 'development contest' and thus prove the superiority of the democratic model to a watchful Third World." (5) But who believed that democratic development was superior?

There was a broad intellectual consensus in America, from Samuel Huntington on the conservative apologetic side to Barrington Moore Jr. on the independent critical side, that Leninists could successfully modernize a poor nation but Indian democracy could not. The conventional wisdom was that, in general, Stalinist big push industrialization worked. North Korea was seen as a success, and South Korea was a basket-case. Thailand was going nowhere while socialist Vietnam was rising. Castro Cuba's turn to Leninism was, of course, a challenge to all of class-polarized Latin America. Only later would such presuppositions be exposed as nonsense. Castro's economy collapsed when it lost Soviet Russian subsidies. Amazingly, many progressive Indians, even in the twenty-first century, somehow imagine Mao's way (or Fidel's) as a success worthy of emulation. Ideological presuppositions are not altered by mere facts.

Mao-era China hid its horrors from view. As a Soviet coal miner's life expectancy was more than twenty years less than an American coal miner's, so, in the Mao era, the life expectancy gap in China between the countryside and the city was larger than the gap between China and India. Leninism created extreme inequality. A Chinese villager was even constrained by the state from leaving the village for the city, forced to grow grain at below-market prices imposed by the state. Such a limit on life choices did not exist in India. 

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. Maoism imposed an abysmally low standard of living. 

By the 1970s, as Brezhnev's Russia stagnated and the horrible truth about Mao's China and Pol Pot's Cambodia became known, some concluded that state socialism actually was a dead end for the rural poor in the Soviet Union, China, and elsewhere. Indeed, it was. Some found that Japan-led East and Southeast Asia, with a policy of export-oriented industrialization (EOI), showed the way out of poverty. But proud, self-wounding, anti-imperialist Indian patriots would dismiss Japan and other countries as negative examples, as having lost their independence and as becoming Americanized, a sad Coca Cola-ization. Actually, already in 1919, Gandhi declared, "Japan has been Westernized; one can no longer even speak of China."

Such dismissals, far more reflective of Indian myopia than East Asian reality, of course, were ridiculous distortions of societal reality in Japan, South Korea, or China, which were as Japanese, Korean, or Chinese as ever. (6) Many Indian intellectuals, however, kept repeating Gandhi's 1919 error and, thereby, rationalized not taking a path that could lift the rural poor out of misery. A blinding purist anti-imperialism of urban elites produced policies that fettered the poorest of the poor. Reform-era China, which abandoned its Mao-era economically irrational anti-imperialism, has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty.

It abandoned revolutionary tourism, in which China paid to fool foreigners into thinking socialism was paradise, for money-earning tourism, in which the splendors of ancient China earned tens of billions in hard currency from foreigners.

In the years immediately after Mao died and before reform gains kicked in, some Chinese intellectuals argued that "even" India was doing better than China. That claim hurt Chinese pride. It was meant to. It was inconceivable to the Chinese that India should do better. To argue even for a higher sports budget, one said "even India" spent more. (7) In fact, Mao had devastated Chinese higher education. Female illiteracy had risen to the same rate as Indonesia. "Even" India spent more on education than did China, which was virtually at the bottom of the world rankings of per-capita spending on education. In the era of institutionalized Maoist socialism (1957-77), life only improved for villagers on the average of one pack of cheap cigarettes per year. An unreported famine was ravaging southwest China when Mao died. China had to import grain to feed its people, while India had moved to grain self-sufficiency.

One standard explanation of China's failure and India's relative success in the late Mao era is that Mao, given his war on scientists and other intellectuals, had missed the "Green Revolution" of new and better seeds. Maoism's importation of Stalinist Lysenkoism, rather than "bourgeois" genetics, had lost China the benefits of modern science. This, however, is not true.

Actually, China had moved in the Green Revolution direction starting in 1970. These gains, however, were cancelled by the waste of Mao's war communist autarky, policies such as "the third front" that diverted investment away from modernization projects into war preparations. That quickly ended with Mao's death. By the early 1980s, rural China was booming. The change happened so fast that Indian intellectuals never pondered why Chinese state socialism in the Mao era actually had been a devastating failure. Per-capita income in China at the end of the Mao era was lower than in India. It was worth spending time contemplating that fact in order to free India from Leninist command economy trammels. Instead, by the mid-1980s, the question, once again, was how to explain India's failure and China's success.

Despite China's stagnant misery in the Mao era, many, including Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen, praise it for revolutionary-era success in reducing poverty, enhancing life expectancy, and equalizing and raising the quality of health care and schooling, especially for the rural poor. Such purported achievements are cited to prod India and others to do more for their rural poor, surely a noble purpose.

However admirable that goal is for India and others and however shameful is India's record on behalf of its rural poor, any Mao-era achievements were, as argued by Justin Lin, the director of the Peking University Center for Economic Research, both artificial and unsustainable. In fact, the rural poor in China were vulnerable and miserable. The real and deep poverty was hidden and latent.

Reform-era changes in China make manifest what was always there, even if not easily observable, in the same way that almost two million of twenty-two million people died from famine in North Korea at the end of the twentieth century and were still kept from the eyes of international aid workers. Foreign observers all too readily can be kept from seeing the inhumanity, misery, and inequality of state socialism.

The three Mao-era famines victimized the invisible rural poor. It was Mao's political priorities that killed the rural poor. There also was, in addition to the Leap-era famine, a famine in 1963 in Anhui when Mao halted economic incentives to launch class struggle. A third famine occurred at the end of the Mao era in southwest China, similarly caused by revolutionary fundamentalism of the inhuman variety institutionalized by Lenin and carried to its logical extreme in Pol Pot's Cambodia. Mao's policies did not benefit the rural poor. (8)

Instead, Mao locked up villagers in the countryside, blocking urbanization and modernization that could create higher-value production. In the Cultural Revolution of his last decade in power, Mao destroyed education, turning teachers into targets for degradation. A Chinese junior middle school graduate in the countryside actually received less education than an elementary school student had received in six years in the era before Mao's destructive Cultural Revolution. Chinese figures on years of education in the Mao era, bad as they are, hide how much worse the Mao-era reality was.

The rural workers in export factories in the reform era whose foreign exchange earnings have been central to China's rise were prepared for that work not by good Mao-era education; such education did not exist. It was Confucian culture and socialization, which continued despite revolutionary attempts to destroy it, that produced young people who were hard working on behalf of family enrichment, a value that was the antithesis of Maoism. But, of course, the poor work hard everywhere. 

Although the Mao-era educational disaster is well known, there is a stylized rhetoric that hides the similar disaster in health care, a discourse that points to longevity and equal state-subsidized access to medical treatment such that illness did not destroy family finances and cause economic polarization and immiseration, as it does in China's reform era. In fact, that longevity gain was the achievement of the age of New Democracy before Mao's fundamentalist communism took over in 1957-58. The health delivery system put in place between 1949-56, which saw that virtually everyone was vaccinated and inoculated, did, indeed, bring great gains in life expectancy. (9)

Once Mao took control of policy in 1957-58, however, he insisted on self-reliance, meaning self-financing. The poor had to take care of their needs with the most meager of resources. They were not subsidized by the state. Unfunded clinics decayed and declined in the Mao era. They were staffed by untrained people incapable of medical diagnoses. They had no medicines or surgery to offer. It was only the urban and state sectors that were subsidized. The rural poor of the Mao era were abandoned.

Once reform began, villagers looked elsewhere for medical care. Traditional herbal medicines--whose growth was barred in the Mao era, lest such profitable economic crop production led tillers to concentrate on money--suddenly became available. No one would pay for seeing the untrained Mao-era people at the village clinic. I was in rural China interviewing clinic workers and villagers when that artificial and unsustainable system of self-funding disappeared in the early 1980s. The Mao-era rural health clinics were useless, a waste. Villagers abandoned this waste as soon as Mao died and sought real doctors.

The reason why illness in the Mao era did not drive people under and produce great income disparities is because, at that time, no one could go out and earn money, and everyone had to live on collectively distributed, relatively equal survival minimums of food. Thus, no one got ahead when one lay ill and untreated. This leveling down and sharing of misery produced, again, an artificial and unsustainable equality. No villager today would accept living at such a primitive level as in the Mao era.

Social expectations have risen. 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.

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. The biggest source of the rural-urban gap remains the locking up of villagers in the countryside in a state-imposed forced production of low-priced basic crops. As in the Mao era, investment privileges the central cities. State workers, not villagers, get unemployment insurance. Also, as in the Mao era, there still is no health care or pension provision from the central government for the rural poor.

The unaccountable ruling party cares for itself. When property is privatized, right down to the county towns and villages, officials (as in Russia) grab the lion's share of the wealth, as in the Mao era they grabbed the food so that their family members did not die in the three famines. Economic inequality is a reflection of enormous political inequality that denies voice and self-representation to the village poor and the more than one hundred million migrant workers.

In short, the growing polarization and increasingly visible poverty of the reform era in China actually are consequences of Mao-era priorities, institutions, and policies that have persisted because of a lack of political reform. The tendencies were latent in the pre-reform era and manifest when something went wrong in the Mao era and poor villagers, three times, were allowed to starve to death. There was nothing admirable in the Mao era that has anything to teach India about how to grapple with rural poverty.

There is, however, much to learn from reform-era China about growth. The energy and investment in modernizing transportation and communication infrastructure are most impressive. India's relative lack of investment in power and infrastructure deter both Indian and foreign investment. A growing gap in this regard now separates China and India.

But Chinese government statistics that show poverty in the reform era as reduced to but 3 percent of the population are as credible as Mao-era claims of poverty reduction and real equality; that is, they are incredible. In fact, using UN standards of poverty, China's poverty rate is quite ordinary for its level of development, and its inequality is extreme, a manifestation of the absolute power of an unaccountable urban-based party that sees investment in equality as a Mao-era fraud not to be repeated. Reform-era growth actually embodies great continuity with the Mao era, as seen by the suffering in the populous, rural, and poor Henan province. Henan had the most famine deaths in the Mao era. It has the most HIV/AIDS deaths in the reform era. In the popular consciousness of the newly prospering and grossly uncaring, the people of Henan are ridiculed for their suffering. The level of uncaring inhumanity in China is extraordinary.

When one compares India and China, one must take the time to penetrate a fog of false claims about China, both in the Mao and post-Mao eras, in order to see the real China and not be taken in by revolutionary or nationalistic self-serving rhetoric that falsities the record, making it seem that the Communist Party in Beijing holds the secret to eradicating rural poverty. In fact, the PRC's record is disappointing. This failure, however, does not excuse or make less painful slow growth or rural misery in India. 

The last defense of India's slow growth is the canard that it is the price of democracy. "Mrs. Gandhi's supporters" believed that "brutality and repressive discipline" made possible "development in China and the Soviet Union." They believed that totalitarian China "advanced faster than" democratic India precisely because China was totalitarian, (10) Democracy was imagined as an obstacle to growth. Even in 1997, the Indian prime minister held to this shibboleth that India had "to pay the economic price for political democracy. (11) Authoritarians could, in this Indian view, grow faster than could free societies whose slow proceduralism combines with vested private interests tied to corrupt bureaucratic and political interests to block rapid development.

Without denying the weight of such negative forces in India, they were worse in the Leninist world. In actuality, it was the entrenched vested interests of Soviet Russia's corrupt, gray, bureaucratic Brezhnevian era that blocked Gorbachev's reform project, leading to Russia's tragic decline. Those interests had reversed Khrushchev's reforms. Authoritarian vested interests are more difficult to overcome than are democratic ones. Likewise, communist Vietnam is confronted by "the unwillingness of the Party to follow its [reformist] words with actions.... If an entrenched and resistant bureaucracy, driven by vested interests, is able to frustrate a meaningful reallocation of scarce national resources, it may prove difficult for the state to sustain economic progress." (12) All statistical studies of growth and the political system conclude that democracy actually is not, in comparative prospective, an obstacle to growth.

American professor Suzanne Ogden mocks the notion that democracy has kept India from developing as quickly as China: "China's commitment to strong economic development is in startling contrast to the Indian government's commitment until recently to 'the Hindu 3 percent rate of growth'--the speed at which the Brahmin class felt India could develop without endangering its privileged elite position." (13) 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.

This analysis of the impact of a political elite and its socioeconomic base can be found in a sophisticated form in Barrington Moore Jr.'s classic study, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy. (14) All of the so-called East Asian miracle economies enjoyed the advantage of beginning with a good land reform, providing land to market-oriented farmers. India did not. Moore found that China's advantage in having destroyed landlord power in Mao's peasant-based revolution would allow Mao's socialist state to develop much faster than India's, such that marginalized villagers in India, the poorest of the poor, eventually would abandon democracy and, to win the blessings of modernity, would be mobilized to support an authoritarian alternative to reactionary, landlord-based democracy.

Moore was wrong, (15) at least until 1978. Mao's socialist state actually locked China's villagers into stagnant misery. (16) Collectivization in 1955-56 lost the gains of the initial land reform, which had been merely a tactic to win peasant support in China's revolutionary civil war. In fact, at Mao's death, because of market-disregarding collectivism in China, according to UN statistics, per-capita income in India was higher than in China. The previous quarter century of analyses explaining why India failed and China succeeded presupposed something that was untrue.

But, in 1978, economic reformer Deng Xiaoping became China's paramount leader and launched a quarter century of sustained high growth that swiftly made China twice as rich as India. A similar openness to market-oriented reform did not begin in India until 1991 and remains far more constrained. Even if India's growth rate since 1991 had been comparable to China's, because China, by 1991, had an economy already about twice the size of India's because of high growth since 1978, the absolute gap between the two countries will continue to grow. (17) This worries patriotic Indians who anxiously imagine a future where, whatever India does, China might still be able to laud it over India. Once again, Indian patriots are fixated on China supposedly succeeding while India, relatively speaking, still fails. However, it is not obvious why a thirteen-year Chinese head start should be decisive in any historical long run.

One might argue that Moore's analysis of China's advantage in having destroyed landlord power by revolutionary means was merely premature or prescient. He has been proven correct since 1978, when China began to transit out of Soviet-style collectives and into relatively equal households that became the dynamo of China's 1979-84 rise out of Mao-era poverty, a path blocked by entrenched Indian rural elites. Even here, however, comparisons turn out to be far more complex than is suggested by the standard essentialist binary presuming that China is a success and India is a failure.

First, China's rural dynamism ended in 1984-85. The subsequent gap in China between rich and poor, urban and rural, southeast coastal and central hinterland, has grown. However polarized postsocialist Russia seems, income distribution in China is more unequal. Social discontent in China, especially among villagers from central China, is high. Future stability is far from guaranteed. This is a position shared by many academic analysts of China. This rural discontent threatens Chinese stability. (18)

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, and so on, but Moore's prediction that peasants in China stabilize an authoritarian political system and those in India destabilize a democratic one seems virtually the opposite of the truth. 

As for the poorest of the poor, as badly off as many village women are in an India whose inability to provide them with basic education and health care is a scandal, these women seem worse in China. In fact, more women commit suicide in rural China than in all other nations combined. This occurs especially away from the coast in central China, where the coercive population control has led to extraordinary efforts by families to get around state population restrictions to guarantee themselves male heirs, despite what happens to vulnerable baby girls.

In a Chinese countryside without pensions or healthcare, parents find a survival imperative both in having village sons to earn for them and also in having daughters-in-law who will care for elders in their advanced years. The result is a gender skewing against women that is among the worst in the world.

With so many men and so few women, the females are imagined by men as too powerful and spoiled, as being able to pick and choose, and, therefore, as being in need of discipline and control. A physically cruel resurgent Chinese patriarchy leaves many women who yearn for the blessings of an open modernity with, instead, a hellish life experience of dashed hopes and dreams, such that death comes to seem to be a better option than life. (19) Given the ruling Communist Party's fear that any autonomous group, such as Falun Gong (FLG) spiritual meditators, could be a threat to the Communist Party (CP) regime's power, as Solidarity was in Poland, ruling groups in China do not readily allow women to organize to help or save women. China lacks India's rich civil society of human rights groups trying to ameliorate the inhumanities inherited from history that the government has let fester. 

If one takes as one's standard for measuring success or failure the destiny and dignity of the least of them, it is not easy to argue that it is China that is the success, despite India's continuing failure to eradicate poverty. For non-chauvinist Chinese who would have their nation live up to its glorious civilizational promise, it is even possible to look at India as having much to be proud of, much worthy of emulation by China. Thus, a south China defense attorney, who has struggled against China's imposition of capital punishment for relatively minor crimes that lead to execution only in China, finds India a model worth emulating as a society that cares about the dignity of even the least of its citizens, at least in comparison to China.

China executes more people each year than the rest of the world put together. Rising urban Chinese, hating crime, drugs, corruption, and so on, welcome the large number of hasty, often mass executions of members of the "dangerous classes," the rural uprooted. However, the Chinese defense attorney campaigning against these arbitrary abuses that target the poor and vulnerable comments, "The influence of foreign countries is important in this debate. When [Chinese] people say, 'What does it matter if a few die, there are over a billion of us,' I say, what about India? They have only executed five or six people, and there are nearly a billion of them." (20) Of course, both India and China are equally culpable in allowing a potential AIDS epidemic to fester, with India perhaps even slower than China in responding to the crisis.

In showing that it is not true that China is a success and India is a failure, the point is not that China always does worse than India; that would be false. Beyond inaction on AIDS, India can be criticized for its unwillingness to join international human rights efforts on behalf of victims in China on the tired and unpersuasive grounds that human rights universalism is a Western imperialist project for imposing alien values on developing nations. The self-wounding rage of Indian anti-imperialism thereby makes India complicit in inhumanities against the rural poor in China, as well as in India.

Such chauvinism is one of the major forces blocking the fulfillment of India's reform project and slowing Indian growth so that the gap between India and China continues to grow. Without a doubt, China has done far better in export promotion, wooing foreign investment, (21) attracting expatriates to return home to invest, promoting tourism, and absorbing the best practices of the world in science, technology, and business administration. If India continues to dawdle and embrace its purist chauvinism, the gap could grow into a chasm. Should India open to best practices, there is no reason that it cannot catch up with China, but an irrational fear of alien pollution keeps Indians from acting in the interest of their nation's economy.

This self-imposed Indian obstacle, nationalism, has little to do with the democratic political system (just look at the openness and success of democratic Taiwan). Instead, India's problems lie in the political realm.

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. (22)

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. (23) Socialists in Singapore discredited themselves and inadvertently helped Lee Kuan Yew's party by chanting the same litany. Islamists today wound their people by a similar obsession. For India,

QUOTEÂ Nehru held most of the countries which later
Â ... formed ASEAN in contempt because of
Â their alignment with either Britain or the U.S.
Â He maintained that they had "Coca-Cola governments"
Â and shared none of India's lofty
Â vision. Today, more than 30 years later, India,
Â as a full dialogue partner, is looking eastward
Â to ASEAN, most of whose economies have
Â left India's recently liberalized economy
Â decades behind. (24) 

India can be compared usefully to regions in Asia other than China. These comparisons do not always add to India's luster.

But the big political obstacles to India's rapid rise come from the nationalistic rejection of openness <img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/blink.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='blink.gif' /> . Can Indian politics abjure the anticolonialism of K. M. Pannikar, in which the "Portuguese of the 16th and 17th centuries had nothing to teach the people of India except improved methods of killing and bigotry in religion"? Is it possible to re-imagine international exchanges as mutually beneficial? I think the Indian political imagination is moving, albeit slowly, in that direction.

From this perspective, when European ships reached India in the sixteenth century, "India was enormously productive, wealthy and densely populated.... Indian ports and shipping bad 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?

In the real world of comparative politics, no nation ever does everything best to enhance growth, yet all have strengths on which to build. In fact, some Chinese are beginning to worry that in the long run, they may not be able to compete with India precisely because India is an English-speaking democracy and China is a dictatorship with grossly underfunded education. This contrast is most potent in information technology (IT) software. India is a world leader, and China has sent missions to find out why. Information technology may prove a weighty factor in the post-Fordist world economy. (26)

One possibility is that political freedom is a major advantage in the information age. Given the Chinese Communist Party's fear of its own people, it tightly controls Internet cafes and Web access. Some argue that this will constrain information technology growth. 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.

This factor favoring India suggests that, as in the past, straight-line projections of Chinese growth in which India seems relegated to defeat should be treated with great skepticism. 

This is especially true for our volatile post-Bretton Woods age, where international finance largely is beyond governmental management. China's banking system could collapse. It is bankrupt. The nonstate sector in India, with the largest firms capitalized at $7 billion or so, contrasts with China's largest private firms, which, despite a quarter century of reform, are still only 10 percent of the size of India's behemoths. Also, labor costs in manufacturing in 1995 were the same in India as in China. It is not the case that all positive factors and forces fall on the Chinese side of the scale in a comparison with India. The earlier and more fully that India completes the project of economic reform, the better it will do.

Still, people ask, from the point of view of standard of living and gross national product, how are India and China doing? This is not easy to answer because of the continuing problem of making sense of Chinese statistics. In one researched village,

QUOTEÂ Official figures during the 1990s became less
Â reliable as the rural economy stagnated and village
Â cadres come under pressure to inflate their
Â achievements ... reported per capita income in
Â 1997 was 2,700 yuan [US $330], a figure that
Â even the villages cadres openly admitted was
Â false. The real per capita income in the late
Â 1990s ... stood at about 1,000-1,100 yuan [US
Â $135]. (27) 

Although Chinese rural incomes stagnated in the four years from 1997-2000, the PRC's National Bureau of Statistics touted a 17 percent rise. (28) The rich-poor gap in China probably is far worse than statistics suggest, although overall growth in China likely is almost as high as claimed.

My own hunch is that although the PRC's official numbers overstate Chinese growth, this is balanced out by the contribution of the off-the-books economy, which is large and growing. Still, it is very possible that India outgrew China from 1997-2000. Indian statistics may understate India's foreign direct investment (FDI) by a factor of two, while China's FDI, according to World Bank statistics, are overstated by a factor of two. (29)

More worrisome for China than uncertain statistics are polarization and misallocation. The widening gap between rich and poor is rooted in Mao-era continuities discussed earlier, which persist because the Chinese dictatorship resists political reform. The misallocation is inherent in the Chinese Communist Party's attempt to maintain control of statist networks. It, therefore, forces banks to loan money to money-losing state-owned enterprises (SOE). 

Bankrolling losers has a negative impact on job creation such that, despite high overall growth, unemployment, polarization, and social tensions all worsen in China because state investment in China largely goes to losers. This tendency to support losers augers ill for China's long-term economic future. (30)

A comparison between China and India, therefore, produces mixed, complex, and contingent conclusions. (31) It certainly is not a matter of explaining a successful China and a failed India. The Asian Development Bank projects higher growth in 2003 for South Asia compared to East Asia. (32) UN statistics show that, measuring from the end of the Mao era, a measure biased to make China's reform growth look best in terms of percentage improvements in health, education, poverty reduction, and life expectancy, India actually has improved faster than China. (33)

The Chinese future remains uncertain. The corrupt political system lacks legitimacy. The most difficult economic reforms--banking, state-owned enterprises, regulation--remain to be addressed. Debt increases. Pensions are unfunded. The banks are bankrupt. Although Beijing has managed its currency brilliantly in the reform era, virtually wiping out the black market in money, there is no guarantee that it will be able to do as well in the future, given the Brezhnevian particularism that increasingly defines the ever more corrupt and self-serving regime, whose brutal greed is outrageous and alienating.

The future cannot be predicted, but should India complete the reform agenda while China remains trapped in the contradictions and constraints of its Brezhnevian authoritarian interests and chauvinistic paranoia, then there is no reason why India should not be able to close the gap with China. The onus lies within the human agencies of the Indian polity. Objectified polar binaries of success versus failure mislead. 

This suggests a series of different bases for comparison between India and China beyond Hinduism versus Confucianism or democracy versus dictatorship, matters of political institutions, leadership, and will. The two nations have very different military traditions, different notions of civilian-military relations. They approach federalism and decentralization differently. Their ruling parties work differently.

They handle issues of diversity in language, religion, and ethnicity or regional identity very differently. In all of these realms, the Indian system seems more legitimate and flexible. It is for good reasons that the Chinese are far more worried about their nation falling apart than are Indians. Riven by persistent Leninist creations of regional polarization, the Chinese are anxious that their reform path will lead to national disintegration as in Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, and Ethiopia.

One of the difficulties in any comparison of India and China is that the problems confronting India are quite public, and those of China are, even now, mainly covered up. One should not romanticize India. The burning of brides by dissatisfied husbands' families is a public scandal in India. It should be. The kidnapping and sale of women into prostitution and forced marriage in China, a large-scale venture with police complicity, is, in contrast, basically kept quiet.

Communal strife is headline news in India. Although China may or may not be heading toward a breakup of the nation, little of analytic value is published in China to help one understand regional and communalist strife. Leninist states marginalize poor minorities and then lock them into their poverty by preventing migration and by state pricing of primary products. The rage of the marginalized in China against those in power hardly can be exaggerated, but it is not readily visible. Indeed, I cannot even recount personal encounters with minority hatred for Han Chinese in this article, for fear of getting those people in serious political trouble.

Evaluating China versus India in terms of the life prospects of the most vulnerable people, one has to assess treatment of minorities, especially religious communities. India's vicissitudes in trying to build a certain kind of secular society are well known. The tragic victims of communalist atrocities and the impact of fundamentalist forces from Gujarat to Delhi on religious minorities are well known and ugly. But rulers in the PRC keep outsiders from knowing just how bad things are for Tibetan Buddhists and Uighur Muslims who are forced to live in virtual apartheid conditions. All international human rights groups find evidence of pervasive and continuing crimes against humanity in China:

QUOTEÂ Beijing's constant jailings of dissidents, religious
Â adherents, environmentalists and others
Â who threaten the ruling regime compares to
Â India's marvelous tolerance for diverse life
Â goals. Unlike GDP, we do not have an indicator
Â to show the gains in welfare when an Indian
Â is able to, say, join an ayurvedic health
Â group run by the Hare Krishnas or parent
Â another child. Nor can we measure the loss
Â when a Chinese practitioner of the Falun Gong
Â meditation sect is forced to recant under threat
Â of confinement or a farmer's wife is forced to
Â abort an unborn child. If we did, India would
Â be the "growth miracle," China the "growth
Â debacle." (34) 

Chinese in the post-Mao era have joined in an extraordinary revival of faith-based commitment. Religion is growing all over China. The Chinese Communist Party is trying to constrain, control, co-opt, or crush this spreading spiritualism. The ruling Chinese Communist Party does not, however, crack down on lineage or very local temples of Buddhism or Daoism. Scattered, small, and unorganized, they are not threatening. They have flourished.

But the rulers in Beijing, looking on religion as would a half-educated village atheist proud of his narrow materialism, are anxious about this explosion of spiritualism. There is in China "a widening gap between the inability of the political leadership to appreciate religion and the growing fascination with religion." (35) Even Christianity and underground house churches are spreading like wildfire in China. This contrasts with India, 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)

In so many ways, China's rulers are abysmal failures who make life worse for the Chinese people. It is Machiavellian, paranoid Chinese patriots who now drive themselves and worrying that they may be Coca Cola-ized if they remain open to the best practices the world has to offer. A continuation of the reform project in China cannot be taken for granted. Fearful of the loss of their cultural essence, the Chinese constrain their reform project. As a result, problems pile up.

Opportunities for reform are not grasped. Explosions remain possible. Victory for antireform forces in China remains all too likely. The gains of the post-Mao economic reform era could yet be lost in a Chinese politics where President Jiang was widely seen as traitorously selling out to Americans for doing what is necessary to maintain access to the American consumer in order to earn the foreign exchange that helps drive Chinese growth.

Harvard University professor Roderick MacFarquhar reports,

QUOTEÂ A leading Chinese scholar-official told me of
Â his first trip to India. He marveled that the elite
Â all spoke English, dressed in Western garb, sent
Â their kids to English--or American--type
Â schools, or even to foreign countries to be educated.
Â In a few places you could still see road
Â names and statues put up by the conqueror. And
Â yet ... these people were without question
Â Indians. What, he asked, had the Chinese been
Â worried about...? (38) 

The normally human in India is still unreachable in China.

But it is not just that China has constructed such scary demons to frighten itself that the success of its reform project remains quite iffy, still threatened by chauvinistic forces and unreformed, politically powerful, very conservative, entrenched Brezhnevian interests. Even more, Indian minds have, for a long time, been contributing to global civilizational richness. Although the Chinese, their creativity crushed by a repressive political system, whine that the supposedly racist and politicized Nobel Prize Committee for Literature refuses to recognize Chinese greatness, ignoring the fact that Nobel laureate Gao Xingjian had to flee Communist Party repression in the PRC to write in Chinese and publish in Taiwan and Hong Kong, Indian authors regularly produce numerous masterpieces of world excellence, enriching all humanity. On so many global cultural debates, Indian voices must be heard and heeded, while repression makes brilliant Chinese seem stupid because of political fears. 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. 

NOTES 
(1.) Manjeet Kripalani, "An Indian's Epiphany in China," Business Week Online, February 14, 2002.
(2.) Minxin Pei, "China's Governance Crisis," Foreign Affairs (September/October 2002): 97, 99.
(3.) "Bai Hua Speaks His Mind," Dongzhang (Hong Kong), nos. 45 and 46 (December 1987, January 1988), translated in JPRS-CAR-88-009, March 4, 1988, 9.
(4.) "Survey on India," Financial Times, June 24, 1997, 2.
(5.) Noam Kochaxi, "Limited Accommodation, Perpetual Conflict," Diplomatic History 26, no. 1 (Winter 2002): 101.
(6.) James Watson, Golden Arches East (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997).
(7.) Susan Brownell, "The Changing Relationship between Sports and the State in the PRC," in Sports ... The Third Millenia, ed. Fernand Landez et al. (Saintes-Foy: Les Presses de l'universite Leval, 1991), 296.
(8.) Edward Friedman, Paul Pickowicz, and Mark Selden, Chinese Village, Social State (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991); and Friedman et al., Revolution, Resistance and Reform in Village China (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005).
(9.) I would tell villagers who complained about China's polarized health-care system that continued in the reform era that, in fact, the rural health delivery system created upon the founding of the PRC was among the few best in the entire developing world and that its virtually universal delivery of vaccination and inoculation had raised life expectancy in China to among the world's highest. That, however, was not the villagers' experience. They would tell me stories of untrained practitioners in Mao's Cultural Revolution era who operated on Zhang San (John Brown) and tied off his wrong tubes. I felt--I had no empirical data--that these stories were built from the kind of gossip that treated worst case events as paradigmatic. But villagers knew that higher officials with serious medical problems did not use the primitive rural facilities to which villagers were consigned. Those officials instead could go to specialized urban, especially military, hospitals, which provided international-level care for China's power elite. Even if villagers found a way into one of those urban facilities, they were relegated to a section that was crowded, lacked medicines, was noisy, understaffed, and harried, while the elite monopolized a special and separate section of the hospital hidden from the hoi polloi. It was spacious, tranquil, and staffed with more medical personnel per patient than most hospitals in industrialized democracies. This polarized health system of the Mao era has changed somewhat in the reform era. Now, nonofficials with money can buy quality service--and do. There is, thus, a new and growing middle stratum. Poor villagers without money, on the other hand, cannot afford health care because health care workers, in contrast to the Mao era, cannot be coerced to work for virtually nothing. The poorest people have gone from very bad Mao-era care to unaffordable reform-era medicine. In either case, China is not a model for India. In fact, the Indian government spends more on health care (and also on education) than China's government.
(10.) Shashi Tharoor, India: From Midnight to the Millenium (New York: Arcade, 1999), 209, 303.
(11.) Inder K. Gejral, "Democracy is the Key," Far Eastern Economic Review, August 21, 1997, 40.
(12.) Ronald Bruce St. John, "Reviews," Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 28, nos. 3-4 (1996): 117.
(13.) Suzanne Ogden, Inkling of Democracy in China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asian Center, 2002), 371. Ogden errs, as do many others, in not seeing that, at the end of the Mao era, India was ahead of China.
(14.) Barrington Moore Jr., Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (1966; repr. Boston: Beacon Press, 1993).
(15.) Edward Friedman, "Development, Revolution, Democracy, and Dictatorship: China versus India?" in Democracy, Revolution and History, ed. Theda Skocpol, 102-23 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998).
(16.) Friedman, Pickowicz, and Selden, Chinese Village; and Friedman et. al., Revolution, Resistance and Reform.
(17.) If both grow at 6 percent per year but China begins at two hundred and India at one hundred, then, in year one, China adds twelve and India adds only six, increasing the absolute gap between the two.
(18.) David Zweig, Democratic Values, Political Structures, and Alternative Politics in Greater China (Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace, 2002).
(19.) Xinran Xue, The Good Women of China (New York: Pantheon, 2002).
(20.) Jesper Becker, Christian Science Monitor, July 3, 2002, 6.
(21.) Nirupam Baipei, Tianiun Jian, and Jeffrey Sacks, Economic Reforms in China and India (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Institute for International Development, 1997).
(22.) Tharoor, India, 162, 172-73.
(23.) Sudipta Karirag, "Dilemmas of Democratic Development in India," in Democracy and Development, ed. Adrian Leffwich (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996), 132, 181.
(24.) Shiraz Sidhva, "Trading Positions," Far Eastern Economic Review, August 21, 1997, 96.
(25.) John Richards, "Early Modern India and World History," Journal of World History 8, no. 2 (1997): 205, 206, 208.
(26.) In contrast, Confucian China does not experience the same ethical obstacles to cloning as are felt in Hindu and Christian civilizations. This could advantage the Chinese economy.
(27.) Yun Xiang Yan, "Courtship, Love and Premarital Sex in a North China Village," China Journal, no. 48 (July 2002): 31.
(28.) Sources from economist Thomas Rawski. See Rawski, "Measuring China's GDP Growth" (in Chinese), China Economic Quarterly, Peking University Chinese Center for Economic Research (forthcoming).
(29.) Edward Luce, "India Stirs," Financial Times, August 29, 2002.
(30.) Thomas Moore, China in the World Market (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
(31.) "View from the Silk Road: Comparing Reform in China and India," Standard and Poor's Credit Week, February 6, 2002.
(32.) Alan Yonan Jr., "Rebound Speeds Up for Most of the Asian-Pacific Region," Asian Wall Street Journal, April 15-21, 2002, 2. India did, in fact, outgrow China in the fourth quarter of 2003.
(33.) Bruce Gilley, "What's Miraculous? Asia's Tortoise and Hare Story," Asian Wall Street Journal, February 26, 2002.
(34.) Bruce Gilley, "Who's Miraculous?," Asian Wall Street Journal, February 26, 2002.
(35.) Tu Weiming in "Whither China?" Bulletin (American Academy of Arts and Sciences) (Spring 2002), 86-87.
(36.) Ibid., 86.
(37.) Ibid., 85.
(38.) Ibid., 89.

Edward Friedman is a professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where he specializes in Chinese politics, international relations, and democratization. 
COPYRIGHT 2004 Heldref Publications

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