The Heft of India and China, Past and Present

World history is in transition and multilateralism is starting to challenge the unipolar order.  Asia is at the center of the change.

This emerging Asia is bookended by two great civilisations. India and China are both as visible on the global stage today as they were hundreds of years ago. It seems that they should be natural partners, but in fact, they are not. Both have common concerns domestically and internationally. At home, both seek to employ, educate, and provide their people a living standard of comfort. Externally, India and China aim to make greater contributions to uphold multilateralism. Geopolitically and strategically, however, they stand apart. A better understanding of each other is necessary, both commonalities and differences, for these are the only two countries of their size and kind in the world.

The greatest commonality is size. As the world’s only two nations with populations of over 1.4 billion each, China and India are on development paths with inherent similarities. Different political and economic systems mean that their pace is at variance, as is their approach. Nevertheless, comprehending each other’s paths is needed, as is what these two unique Asian giants can learn from each other.

So much of India’s potential can be seen in China. So much of what India is can be learned by China.

China reformed early, and conducted everything at scale and planned for the long term. Managing scale is important for large population-countries, and China understands scale. It thinks, plans, builds and implements at scale. From schools to factories to cities, highways to ports, China has mastered scale.

This has enabled it to become the world’s factory in terms of exports. It has inserted itself into simple and sophisticated global supply chains and grown them substantially. China envisioned and proposed the Belt and Road Initiative at scale. Foreign policy thinking at scale has enabled China to use its young talent and embed it in the international system, particularly in the UN and its affiliates like World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) and International Telecommunication Union (ITU), where Chinese companies have global technology, capacity, and scale.

The rise of China’s human capital is also on full display. From just 18 PhDs in 1978, China awarded more than 550,000 doctorates in 2022. That’s just short of those awarded by the U.S., and four times more than India’s 130,000 PhD degrees.

In many ways, India had similar compulsions, but took different paths —one was uneven, often with hesitations, democratic, culturally diverse, but which is achieving the same goals of development, wealth creation, cultural preservation, and self-respect.

India can learn much from China in terms of scale, long-term planning, and deep reform. Some began under Narendra Modi’s government. As chief minister of Gujarat, he visited China several times, saw its progress first-hand, and implemented some of what he saw in his state. As prime minister, he brought long-term thinking and reform to the office.

India is now committed to large infrastructure projects from city metro transit to highways, ports, airports. Over the past 10 years, India has seen a 500 percent increase in its highway budget, with a 60 percent increase in the road network. Railways have seen a substantial upgrade, with extensive electrification, 100 new trains added, and 1,318 stations upgraded. The metro network has quadrupled to 945 kilometres, with another 919 kilometres being added in 26 cities. Air connectivity is a big leap, with 545 new domestic routes, and total airports doubled to 158. Waterways and ports have seen slower development, but they are picking up pace.

Domestic and foreign investors are participating and funding the large infrastructure buildout in India, particularly those from Japan and West Asia. By 2025, US$1.4 trillion will have been spent in this sector. As in China, new roads bring markets closer to both producers and consumers.

Schools have come closer to students. What China does with planning, India does through its society. Government schemes ensure state schools every five kilometres. India’s competitive politics ensure that students attend school. Many states provide students, especially girls, with bicycles to travel to school. Across India, the parents — and now social organizations like Akshaya Patra — ensure that all children receive a hot, nutritious mid-day meal.  School enrolment rates in India are over 95 percent, in no small part thanks to these social and political interventions.

Post-independence development in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s was uneven, and India was unable to create enough manufacturing jobs for its educated people. Many, especially the engineers, left to go overseas for economic opportunities, but those who stayed established world-class software businesses that created a new wave of globalization in the 2000s and gave rise to IT hubs like Bangalore, Hyderabad, Chennai, and Pune. Those who left have become CEOs of multinational corporations from Citibank to Mastercard, Microsoft, Google, Deutsche Bank, Softbank, Pepsi, and Chanel. India is now a critical part of the digital services supply chain.

Alongside bringing business to the country, the goodwill and trust earned by these global leaders has enabled India’s inward-looking foreign policy to transform with confidence. Relations with non-traditional allies like the U.S., Japan, EU, and West Asia have expanded. This has helped to keep a vital balance in today’s world.

Now it is time for both countries to reconnect with their past, which were linked first by knowledge, and then trade. India was the birthplace of profound civilizational ideas long before Greece. It attracted Chinese monks and travellers who translated Sanskrit literature into Chinese for years, at scale.

India’s early engagement with China was in 217 B.C., when Buddhist scholars came to China during the Qin Dynasty (221B.C.-207 B.C.). The trading began with silk and cotton. It was cosmopolitan in nature and multilateral. The Han Dynasty (202 B.C.-220A.D.) was contemporaneous with the Mauryan Empire, the Kushans, Persia, and the Roman Empire. A network of shifting caravan routes connected markets, towns, and oases to each other.

These trans-Asian routes were obliterated when the Europeans entered Asia, especially with Britain’s victory in the First Opium War (1840-1842), which gave British and European trading houses the upper hand. Since then, India and China have learned about each other, not directly, but indirectly, through the West. From Britain to America, the young learn each other’s histories and political inclinations through a Western lens.

It is necessary for the two important Asian nations to comprehend each other directly. Both countries have heft. At 1.4 billion each, they comprise 37 percent of the planet’s people, and nearly 30 percent of world GDP — China at 19 percent, and India nearly ten percent.

Whichever way they lean, separately or together, counts. It will change the global direction.

The author is the co-founder & executive director of Gateway House: Indian Council on Global Relations, a foreign policy think-tank in Mumbai established in 2009.