[File: D&E Chapter 1]

[File: D&E_Patricia_foreword EDITOR’S FOREWORD COMPARING CHINA AND INDIA: THE CHALLENGES FOR SOCIAL SCIENCE Patricia Uberoi Comparisons of China and India are indeed ‘the flavour of the day’. They come in many different shapes and forms, from many different quarters, and with different ideological agendas, pragmatic imperatives and strategic designs. A number of these also invoke the figures of the dragon and the elephant -- not always flattering, sometimes rather menacing. The dragon image in particular carries a sense of menace, to which the elephant lends ponderous weight. The indigenous connotations of majesty are completely obscured in either case.1 In this book, as Professor Tan Chung explains, the dragon-elephant metaphor inscribes a different semantic ground. On the one hand the image seeks to recover the shared Buddhist heritage of India and China whereby the mythical nāga, a protective, serpentine divinity, had metamorphosed many centuries ago into the Chinese long-xiang, dragon-elephant fused together into a single supernatural being. The sense is of a shared past, and a shared, revitalized2 future as China and India together reclaim their due place as ‘great nations’3 on a global stage. On the other hand is the image of a ‘dance’ -- not the ungainly dance of ill-matched monsters but, as the English rendering of ‘tango’ suggests, a fluid partnership set to modern rhythms, inciting both corporeal intimacy and individual virtuosity. The re-grounding of the title metaphor of ‘dragon and elephant’ is not the only way in which the present book attempts to distinguish itself from the growing number of 1 China-India comparative studies. In fact, the book is pioneering in several ways, which I shall briefly attempt to contextualize, albeit at the risk of caricaturing a complex and ever-evolving field. First, it would no doubt be true to say that the majority of exercises in China- India comparison are conducted off-shore, as it were, for instance, under the aegis of international development agencies, or in newly established centres of China-India studies -- in Singapore, Leiden, London, New York, etc., as the case may be. While many Chinese and Indians have contributed individually to these efforts, and sometimes also taken the initiative, the point is that these activities have not for the most part been institutionally located in either county. As a corollary it would follow that the research priorities of Sino-Indian comparative studies have not been set by Chinese and Indians by or for themselves, or in engagement face-to-face with each other, but reflect in a broad sense the strategic interests and economic concerns of the West (the US in particular), interpreted through the ruling paradigms of western social science. Knowledge of India in China and of China in India has typically been routed through and mediated by the western academies. That this is beginning to change is a welcome development. The publication of The Dragon-Elephant Tango by the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences in 2007tself signals a changed orientation and a first fruit of SASS’s newly established centre of comparative China-India studies.4 Similarly, over the last ten years, the Institute of Chinese Studies in Delhi has organized a series of collaborative conferences under its Comparative Development Studies Programme on themes of mutual India-China concern -- Economic Reforms, Foreign Direct Investment, Local Governance, the Middle Classes, 2 and Democratization, as well as on gender studies, rural development, domestic labour, women and law, etc. Until recently it was a lonely path,5 reflecting the unfortunate fact that -- except in dedicated Area Studies departments -- Indian social science has focused almost exclusively on issues of Indian society, polity and economy set against the ‘default’ model of Western socio-economic development. We imagine that Chinese social science has been similarly inward-looking in its aspiration for transparent and immediate policy relevance. Second, there are questions of methodology. As the subtitle of Robyn Meredith’s Dragon and Elephant indicates,6 much of the coupling of India and China in western academic, public and media discourse is motivated by the question of what the rise of these two countries as economic powers portends for the rest of the world -- with particular reference to competition for natural resources, the exacerbation of climate change, and so on, in addition of course to the spectre of the destabilization of the Western economies. Though often articulated in the idiom of ‘blame game’, these are questions which Chinese and Indian social science will have to address -- separately, together, and in world forums. But in Indian writings, both popular and academic, the thrust of China-Indian comparisons is rather different. The reigning idiom is that of a competitive ‘race’, dominated by the idea of whether, when and how India will ‘catch up’ with China.7 In recent years, recognition of China’s dazzling economic performance has led many Indian academics and public figures to advocate all-out emulation of the ‘Chinese model’ of economic reforms. Again, the fact that the field of vision has finally expanded beyond the Western developmental paradigm and in the direction of Asia is surely to be 3 welcomed. However, there is little appreciation by these enthusiasts of the downside of the Chinese model (for instance, in terms of environmental degradation and pollution, increased social inequalities, growing rural-urban and regional disparities, social unrest, etc.), problems that India is also facing for its own part. Nor, more pertinently, is there recognition of the ongoing and self-conscious efforts of the Chinese government to correct distortions in the growth process, fundamentally re-think its social security system, and chart new directions for the future.8 Other Indian social scientists and makers of public policy have different perspectives, of course, which should be frankly acknowledged. These range from paranoid fear of China overwhelming India economically (through ‘dumping’, for instance, or by out-bidding India for stakes in international oil reserves), to doomsday scenarios (China’s development miracle is an illusion concealing incurable frailties), to arrogant insouciance based on the belief that China and India are essentially incomparable (an autocratic communist versus a democratic system of governance) and that the Chinese example is therefore completely irrelevant to India’s neo-liberal development discourse. It would probably be true to say that, until relatively recently, India has not been conspicuous on the radar screen of Chinese academic or public opinion, except for the security and international relations establishments whose business it is to keep watch. Most Chinese appear confident that India is far behind China on all relevant development indices, falling ever further behind rather than catching up,9 and that the sights of China’s planners are best focused on those ahead of China in the race for economic growth and higher living standards – Japan and Western Europe in the first instance, and ultimately the US. There is no need to look backwards! Clearly, too, India is a rather uncomfortable 4 reality for many Chinese, not merely because of what is seen as a very messy, even unstable, political system, or a picture of grueling poverty and backwardness, but also for its unapologetic and conspicuous religiosity, which appears to many Chinese to undermine the quest for national modernity and the implementation of a ‘scientific outlook’ on development. As of the last decade, however, we are witness to the fact that this dismissiveness of the Indian experience has begun to change – in both academic and official circles, if not conspicuously among the wider public, and there is even recognition of the fact that India has a long experience and its own philosophy of handling religious and ethnic diversities. This book, and several other initiatives in which Professor Tan Chung has been involved, 10 is in fact evidence of the changed perceptions. The metaphor of the ‘race’ -- of hare and tortoise, or of dragon and elephant -- that dominates many contemporary comparative studies of China and India also tends to privilege quantifiable indicators of growth (GDP, FDI, income data, trade figures, etc.) over concern with the less measurable aspects of growth, equity and quality of life interpreted in a wider context of political economy, and in both a short-term and long- term historical evolution. This book, too, may have some elements of that inescapable discourse of our era, marked by preoccupation with standardized economic indicators as the measure of the success or failure of development. However, as Professor Pan Guang rightly notes in his Introduction to the Chinese Dragon-Elephant Tango (see below), it is not the work of social science to judge winners and losers in the development ‘race’, or to apportion approval or disapproval, but rather to employ the tools of our trade to enhance understanding of the different models in their wider socio-political contexts. As he 5 stresses, this should be a learning experience, whereby understanding the other can lead to better understanding of the self. Apart from the strictly practical implications of such ‘learning from each other’, Pan might also have added that the ultimate goal of China- India comparative studies must be the renovation of our tools of social scientific understanding and the promotion of a new kind of social science that is less parochial and more truly reflective of global history. One must candidly admit that the last ambition remains a very distant goal. Apart from reliance on quantitative indices to the exclusion of political economy, the ‘race’ idiom in China-India comparative development studies is especially focused on the period after the institution of economic reforms (1978 and 1991 in China and India respectively) -- when the two hitherto very different trajectories began to merge.

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