[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. But it is

important to recognize that neither China nor India were born at the moment of the

initiation of their respective economic reforms programmes, and treating these markers as

the starting line of the race of ‘giants’ may ultimately obscure as much as it reveals.

From this perspective it is significant that this book, though focused on the

contemporary situation, attempts to locate the present within the larger ambit of post-

Liberation nation-building, nineteenth- and twentieth-century anti-colonial and anti-

imperialist struggle, and ultimately within a millennia-long history of two-way cultural

interchange and communication. It thus mediates the diametrically opposed perspectives

of Indian and Chinese historians (Sinologists and Indologists respectively), who typically

focus on the ‘feel-good’ sphere of inter-cultural exchange through the centuries, and the

perspectives of security and strategic experts, again on both sides, whose model of Sino-

Indian relations is a ‘zero-sum’ calculus epitomized in the still-unresolved border issue

6 that brought China and India to war in 1962. We are invited here to put this event in its

place in the long course of a shared continental history; and to move ahead.

As a collective work of contemporary Chinese scholarship on India, albeit

transmogrified by a scholar whose sensibilities are as Indian as they are Chinese,11 this book is an indication that some Chinese scholars, planners and policy-makers are beginning to look seriously to India -- to compare experiences and seek alternative solutions to shared dilemmas of development, and not merely to improve the level of expertise and intelligence on a neighbouring country that is increasingly demonstrating its economic capability. In what follows, I shall comment briefly on three interrelated aspects of the book in its present, English-language form: (i) the perspective; (ii) the substantive issues addressed; and (iii) the style of presentation and argument.

First, as already mentioned, the book attempts to locate its comparison of development issues in China and India in a wider temporal context: that is, not just the post-Reforms periods, but in reference to the foundations laid in the immediate post-

Liberation period, the longer history of anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggle in both countries, and the long history of Sino-Indian interactions through twenty centuries. This gesture removes the 1962 War from its iconic role as the condensation of Sino-Indian relations in modern times. On the whole, India post-Independence is seen to have followed a slower, yet overall more consistent, path of economic development; post-

Liberation China, on the other hand, has undergone many dramatic twists and turns which have left their residue. But in either case, present realities need to be interpreted in the light of the road already traveled.

7 The book also consciously eschews the idiom of the ‘race’ (though an element of

competition will invariably infuse the project of China-India comparison) for a more

nuanced picture of ‘parallels’, ‘divergences’ and ‘convergences’ in the development

experiences of both countries. This rather unusual emphasis is in fact embedded in the

structure of the narrative. Each chapter deals first with China; then in parallel with India;

then attempts to summarize the convergences and divergences of the two, noting the

lessons, good and bad, that each might learn from the experience of the other, and

highlighting the areas of potential complementarity or effective bilateral division of

labour, as well as the scope for China-India collaboration on a world stage. The standard

example of the former is the complementarity between China’s expertise in ICT hardware

and India’s in software; of the latter, the potential for collaboration, in preference to

cutthroat competition, in the energy sector.

It is interesting to see how, in this account, the convergences and divergences, parallels and complementaries, work out rather differently in each of the three major development-oriented chapters – that is, the chapters on Agriculture, Industry, and

Information Technology. In the domain of agriculture, for instance, one sees very

different trajectories of development in two huge and largely agrarian countries whose

baseline was remarkably similar; yet a shared sense of crisis in respect to the future, and a

desperate search for new policy alternatives to resolve the basic contradictions of land,

labour and capital, to substantially enhance agricultural productivity, and to bring the

benefits of growth to a large rural population.

In regard to industrial development, the domain in which the Chinese

performance has been so phenomenal, one sees a candid re-thinking of policy options.

8 China is no longer content to be ‘the factory of the world’, producing huge volumes of

low-end goods on behalf of multinational firms, but seeks to ensure the sustainability of

industrial growth by nurturing product innovation and high-end manufacturing. India’s

relative success in the service industries is a matter of remark, and of course both

countries face a growing energy crisis and increasing problems of environmental

degradation.

As regards Information Technology, as already noted, there has developed a sort

of international division of labour whereby China has excelled in IT hardware development, and India in software. While this has become almost a cliché in public pronouncements on the potential for India-China complementarity and opportunities for

collaboration, what is interesting in the present account is the Chinese emphasis on two

outstanding features of the Indian experience. The first is the role of innovation, reflected

in the circuits that link émigré Indian ‘techies’ to the hubs of software and ITES

development in the home country; and the second, the entrepreneurial talent of Indian

businesses, both old-established and up-start, which have quickly become multinational,

global enterprises – all this, somewhat to the Chinese amazement, with minimal

government patronage. As might be expected, the exploration of convergences,

divergences, parallels and complementarities is on a rather different footing in the chapter

dealing with the international standing and the international relations of China and India,

but perhaps the bottom line here is the idea that, as growing economic power translates

into political influence, China and India together will have both a special role and a joint

responsibility in fostering peace and progress in the Asian region and the world at large.

9 Second, it is interesting to note the specific issues that are taken up here for comparison. Despite visible achievements in the areas of agricultural, industrial and ICT development in both China and India, none of these domains is presented as a story of unmitigated success. Rather, the sense is of having reached a plateau -- of a crisis of sustainability which calls for a serious rethinking of development strategies in a comparative perspective. In particular, as already mentioned, it is the attention given in this book to the problems of the agrarian sector that distinguishes it from other accounts of the ‘rise’ of the Asian giants, India and China. Traveling different developmental roads, the problems now facing the agrarian sector in both countries are remarkably similar. The difference, perhaps, is the very frontal address now given to the ‘three rural problems’ (san nong wenti) in the Chinese planning process, compared to the relatively piecemeal and un-theorized approach in India.

Third, there are a number of features of the presentation and argument which may need some contextualization for those unfamiliar with Chinese political and social science discourse -- and for many Indians, who may find a certain lack of fit between their self-perception and ground-level experience, and the picture of the Indian course of development that emerges from this comparative exercise. They may similarly feel puzzled by the manner in which Chinese writers tell the story of China’s own course of modernization and development.

An example of the latter is the way in which the Chinese portray new developmental ‘models’ as these transit the course from local experiment to national public policy. This is particularly evident in the chapter on agricultural development where, in response to the rural crisis and the plateauing of productivity of the Town and

10 Village Industries (TVEs) which had been the engine of rural growth from the mid-

1980s, a number of new ‘models’ are being extracted from ad hoc experiments and arrangements on the ground and substantialized in academic and public discourse. We have familiar examples of this in India, too -- for instance, the Anand experiment with cooperative dairying, the Sewa initiative to support self-employed women, or the Chipko movement for environmental protection, etc. -- but one might hazard the opinion that these do not have the same role in Indian public policy discourse as they have in China, nor the same orchestrated media attention. What is particularly interesting in the Chinese case is the move from singu lar, nation-wide examples -- like the famous ‘learning from

Dazhai’ campaign begun in 1964 -- to a consideration of a plurality of options, determined by ecological constraints, developmental levels, locational advantages, etc.

Most of these bear village, town or regional names. With this perspective transposed to description and analysis of the Indian pattern of development, the focus in the chapter on

ICT development, for instance, is on the ‘hubs’ and hub cities, like Bangalore, Delhi-

Gurgaon, Mumbai, Hyderabad, etc., where regional government initiatives have been significant in fostering new developments, though a more conventional ‘management’ perspective also seeps through in the accounts of exemplary individual entrepreneurial activities in the ICT field.

A second feature of the presentation that might strike Indian readers in particular is the ex post facto critique and correction of policy. That is, at any one point in time,

Chinese government policies are projected as self-evident and unassailable until a new policy is announced, whereupon the limitations of the former policy are candidly discussed. In India, it seems, official policies come into being with simultaneous and

11 often well-publicized critique and detraction -- something which in China is conducted much more behind-the-scenes.

This leads us to a third, and major, feature of the Chinese discourse of development. It is, on the whole, state-centred. Socio-economic and political changes are read off from official policy documents and pronouncements. Such a perspective ignores the gap between policy statement and actual implementation. In India, for a variety of reasons, this gap is huge; but it is significant in China as well, in ways that are obscured in the simple rehearsal of official policies.

The Chinese development discourse is ‘statist’ in another, albeit related, sense, namely that the state (whether at the central, regional or local levels) is projected as the main actor in the development process, though in fact we are aware that the formulation of new policy initiatives involves a very complex and extensive process of across-the- board consultations, including with business interests, at all levels of the socio-political hierarchy. That is, the process of policy formulation is not actually as ‘top-down’ as it may appear from the presentation of the finished product. In India, the state is also important of course, both constraining as well as promoting development initiatives. But there are also vigorous non-governmental (NGO) civil society and people’s movements on the one side, and an entrepreneurial, transnational business community on the other, which together have been responsible for many of the developments that have attracted the attention of Chinese observers at a time when the Chinese government is recognizing the need for innovation, creativity and entrepreneurial skills to take Chinese industrial development to a new stage.

12 A final point to note is the overall ‘technicist’ orientation of the monograph -- that is, the great confidence expressed throughout in the application of science and technology to the solution of problems of development. This is in line with the ‘scientific outlook on development’ that was inscribed as an amendment into the Constitution of the

Communist Party of China (CPC) in its Seventeenth National Congress in October 2007.

For instance, the answer to stagnating agricultural production is seen to lie transparently in biotechnological innovation, Genetically Modified (GM) crops in particular, notwithstanding the resistance of consumers and biologists worldwide; massive hydroelectric projects and nuclear power facilities are seen as self-evident solutions to power-shortages, irrespective of safety, environmental or social concerns; or India’s high- tech ICT revolution and the spurt in the service sector are portrayed as the high points of

India’s development achievements, while the absolute numbers of people living in poverty fail to register appreciable decline, massive efforts in poverty eradication notwithstanding.

* * *

This book, which only partially covers the ground of the original Chinese Dragon-

Elephant Tango, represents a huge collective effort by our colleagues and friends at the

Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences and our former colleague and doyen of China

Studies in India, Tan Chung, to chronicle the ‘rise’ of China and India in parallel, and to understand the lessons of this phenomenon from the perspective of comparative social science. It is a truly ambitious agenda which, in its execution, is bound to erase the fine details and complexities in favour of the bold sweep. We in India have yet to produce a comparably magisterial address from an Indian social science perspective to the parallels,

13 divergences and convergences of the twin development experiences; perhaps we have neither the manpower nor the resources to do so. Meanwhile, these efforts by our long- term partners in SASS should stimulate and challenge us to undertake intensive micro- studies within a China-India comparative framework, and to do so in inter-institutional, face-to-face collaboration with Chinese scholars rather than through the mediation of the

Western academies. This collaboration in social scientific understanding of ourselves in the light of the other will be the real test of the maturity of China and India as Asian

‘giants’.

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Endnotes

1 In China, the dragon signifies glory, happiness, majesty and prosperity, while in India the elephant signifies majesty, prosperity (the elephant is the companion/vehicle of the Goddess Lakshme, the goddess of wealth and well-being), as well as steadfastness. As in the West, contemporary Indian symbolization of China through the figure of the dragon also conveys a notion of menace. 2 ‘Revitalization’ or ‘regeneration’ -- the sense of fuxing in the title of the Chinese book: Longxiang Gungwu: Dui Zhongguo he Yindu Liangge Fuxing Daguode Bijiao Yanjiu (The Dragon-Elephant Tango: Comparative Studies of the Revitalization of the Two Great Countries, India and China), Shanghai, Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, 2007. 3 As indicated in the note above, the term ‘great country/nation’ (Daguo), conveying the sense of ‘power’ was the expression used in the Chinese title. 4 See Professor Zuo Xuejin’s preface to the present work and Note 2 above. 5 Among recent new initiatives is the setting up of a new centre of Sino-Indian studies in Kolkata under the aegis of the Observer Research Foundation. A number of existing ‘think-tanks’ have also recently initiated China-India comparative studies. 6 Robyn Meredith, The Elephant and the Dragon: The Rise of India and China and What it Means for All of Us, W.W. Norton, New York, 2007. 7 Long-term China-watchers were amazed, for instance, to note the large number of references to China in the parliamentary debate on the vote of confidence in the Manmohan Singh UPA government (22/07/08) -- many justifying the proposed US-India nuclear deal as a means of ‘catching up with China’. 8 The Chinese language Dragon-Elephant Tango also includes sections on social issues and social policy, including social security, welfare of the aged, medical insurance and population policy, the latter being identified as one of the major issues in both China and India to which neither country has yet found adequate solutions. Unfortunately, owing to space constraints, we were unable to include these sections, along with the chapter on religious belief, in the present English-language version of this book 9 This is evident in the fact that the GDP of India in 1984 was only 30 per cent less than that of China, but the deficit had increased to 40 per cent in 1994, and to 60 per cent in 2004. Figures cited by former Singapore Prime Minister, Lee Kuan-yew in a speech in New Delhi in November 2005. See the report in The Hindu, 21 November 2005, and www.ciionline.org/common/313. 10 See for instance, Tan Chung (ed.), Zhong-Yin Datong: Lixiang yu Shixian (: Idealism and Realization), Ningxia People’s Press, Yinchuan, 2007. 11 Son of Professor Tan Yun-shan, the founder-director of the Cheena Bhavana (China Institute) at ’s Visva Bharati University in Santinikentan, Professor Tan Chung spent 45 years in India teaching Chinese language and literature to generations of students of the Delhi and Jawaharlal Nehru Universities, and inaugurating a series of projects in Sino-Indian inter-civilizational dialogue under the aegis of the National Centre for the Arts, New Delhi.

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