Author: Howard W. French
Publication: The New York Times
Date: April 9, 2005
URL: http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/04/09/news/india.html
When China's prime minister, Wen
Jiabao, arrives here on Saturday, his four-day visit will be filled with
the usual handshakes and protocols that would ordinarily go little noticed
beyond this region. This diplomatic mission, though, will have an altogether
different feeling.
Perhaps for the first time, there
is an expectation that both India and China, together representing a third
of humanity, are coming into their own at the same moment, with the potential
for a dynamic shift in the world's politics and economy.
The impact on the global balance
of power, the competition for resources and the health of the planet is
causing many analysts and political leaders to sit up and take notice.
For the rest of the world, this
shift could be profound. For industrialized nations in the years ahead,
it may well mean more downward pressure on wages, the outsourcing of still
more jobs and greater competition for investment. In most countries it
will likely lead to higher prices for scarce resources.
The rise of China has already been
felt far and wide, from the export of often unbeatably cheap manufactures
to the thick plumes of its industrial pollution that spread eastward across
the Pacific and the effect of its fast-growing economy on rising oil prices.
The addition of India, already a
major force in services, could pull the globe's economic and political
center of gravity decidedly toward Asia, and away from an aging Europe
and a United States already stretched by security threats and swelling
deficits.
Indeed, Beijing's overtures toward
India are being contemplated with a keen awareness of China's rivalry with
the United States, which has also jealously courted New Delhi, lately promising
to help make it a "major world power in the 21st century.
For that reason, Wen will come with
a package of initiatives.
They are aimed at drawing India
and China, the world's two most populous nations, closer than they have
been at any time since the 1950s.
Both sides say they will push hard
to resolve a decades-old border dispute. There is talk of a free-trade
agreement as well as joint oil exploration and purchases of commercial
airliners.
China may even endorse India's bid
to become a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council, or
at least strongly hint at its support.
"If the measure is whether you consult
them or take them into account, both countries will be major powers," said
Stephen Cohen, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a research
institute in Washington.
Still, he noted, relations are not
completely carefree. "As long as their relationship remains trade, economic
ties, cultural, even kibitzing with the U.S., that is fine," Cohen said,
"but as soon as you get some confrontation, on the border, Chinese goods
flooding into India, or an incident at sea, or in Tibet or Nepal, then
things quickly become much more nationalistic and complicated."
Indeed, competition is a byword
as much as cooperation. The day after Wen arrives, work is set to begin
on India's first indigenous aircraft carrier. The construction is clearly
being undertaken with China's rising power in mind.
"Nonetheless," Cohen added, "I see
them collaborating in a lot of areas: high technology, the auto industry
and others."
China, already an economic powerhouse,
is increasingly on people's minds in India, both as a model to be learned
from and a cautionary tale. From boardrooms to research institutions and
opinion pages, Indians speak often nowadays of matching their neighbor's
success and power or, as some now dare suggest, surpassing it.
As long ago as 1959, John F. Kennedy
spoke of the importance of what he saw as a contest between these two giants,
casting their rivalry as one "for the leadership of the East, for the respect
of all Asia, for the opportunity to demonstrate whose way of life is better."
Not least, the two nations pursued
divergent paths: India, democracy and belated economic reforms since the
1990s; China, a Communist system that began reforms in 1979, unleashing
rapid economic growth.
But for much of the last half-century
that contest was a dud. China nearly self-destructed during the Cultural
Revolution of the 1960s, and India wasted decades on policies that left
its economy closed and stagnant while hundreds of millions of its people
were mired in poverty.
Today, their simultaneous emergence
has few comparisons in modern history, economists say.
According to the World Bank, their
combined growth can be credited with cutting the share of the world's population
living in extreme poverty to 20 percent in 2001 from 40 percent two decades
earlier.
By the reckoning of most experts,
China's development enjoys a good 15-year head start on India. Today India
has more illiterates - 480 million, by some estimates - than the country's
entire population at independence in 1949, dire poverty on a much larger
scale than in China and even persistent hunger.
"India still faces problems that
China addressed 50 years ago, rural reforms that would allow us to create
a minimally capitalist environment," said Jayati Ghosh, an economist at
Delhi University. "It is obscene that we haven't provided education, but
we also have 250 million educated people we can't employ."
Despite India's rapid growth, that
gap shows no signs of narrowing, and Indians worry openly whether a consensus
for growth can be sustained with the kind of single-mindedness that has
helped propel China.
There is constant talk these days
of turning Mumbai, the coastal commercial metropolis formerly known as
Bombay, into a new Shanghai, mainland China's most glittering modern city.
For now, that is little more than a pipe dream.
More to the point may be Bangalore,
India's booming capital of telephone call centers and high-tech software.
Even there, growth has been menaced by political delays that have stalled
construction of a new airport for seven years. Shanghai, on the other hand,
built one of the world's most spectacular airports in just three years.
Such contrasts have left some Indians
to remark, sometimes despairingly, about a "democracy price" that slows
their development. At the same time, almost invariably Indians say they
would have it no other way.
"I'm often approached by friends
returning impressed from China, saying how our airports in Bombay and Delhi
can't compare," said G.P. Deshpande, a longtime China scholar at Jawaharlal
Nehru University in Delhi. "When I tell them that these things come in
a package, that you don't just get the new airports, and I describe the
package, though, they say 'no, thank you."'
The package Deshpande alludes to
is strict authoritarianism, which allows the local and central governments
in China to rezone entire districts without so much as a hearing, to pollute
city and countryside without having to face public objections and to conduct
large-scale social engineering, often disastrously, but with similarly
little question.
Indians who follow events in China
say proudly that no government of theirs could survive the kind of major
mining disasters that are a regular occurrence in China.
"Both countries have waited 3,000
years for this moment of economic liberation, of solving age-old problems
of want, and being 15 years behind doesn't matter to us," said Gurcharan
Das, a former corporate executive and author of "India Unbound," a best-selling
account of his country's recent revival. "Indians will wait if that is
the price of being able to talk, which Indians hold dear."
Despite the sharp limits on free
speech in their country, Chinese intellectuals talk, too, often enviously,
of India's advantages in democratic governance. For all of China's apparent
strengths today, they say, future success may depend on democratic reform.
"If China learns its lessons from
India, it can succeed in democratizing in the future," said Pang Zhongying,
a professor of international relations at Nankai University in Tianjin.
"India is a far more diverse country,"
he said, "a place with the second largest Muslim population in the world,
and lots of ethnic minorities, and yet it organizes regular elections without
conflict. China is 90 percent Han, so if India can conduct elections, so
can China."
The Chinese have also begun openly
to question the kind of growth their authoritarianism has spawned.
"We are using too many raw materials
to sustain this growth," said Pan Yue, China's environment minister, in
a recent interview with the German magazine, Der Spiegel. "To produce goods
worth $10,000, for example, we need seven times more resources than Japan,
nearly six times more than the United States and, perhaps most embarrassing,
nearly three times more than India. Things can't, nor should they, be allowed
to go on like that."
Pan predicted bluntly that China's
miracle "will end soon because the environment can no longer keep pace."
Others worry about China's seeming addiction to massive investment, which
leads to huge waste and steep cyclical downturns, a shaky financial system
imperiled by a massive burden of non-performing loans, and rampant official
corruption.
