India-China:Competitors not Enemies

[Guest guest]

"Shourie questioned the wisdom of comparing the pace of our economic

reform with China's by pointing out that they executed two employees

of a state-run company for minor corruption. Here we have such a soft

system..."

 

 

Our great wall of China

Both of us are trying to sell reforms to the world and ourselves.

China, political; we, economic. That makes us competitors, not

enemies

Shekhar Gupta

sg

 

Let's begin this by flagging for your attention to three items

published on the op-ed page of this newspaper recently.

 

* Extracts from Arun Shourie's K.M. Cariappa Memorial Lecture

highlighting the dangers of our current, `denial mode' regarding

China's economic advances.

 

* The text of US Ambassador Robert Blackwill's speech to FICCI at New

Delhi where he talked about the gap an economically resurgent China

was putting between itself and India. He reeled off a most stunning

series of figures to show how we had been left behind. And, obviously

conscious of the `denial mode' where we tend to dismiss all these

figures as usual Chinese fabrications, he turned the knife by stating

that these were all IMF/World Bank figures and not Chinese.

 

* A sobering exchange between Nixon, Zhou (Chou) Enlai and Kissinger

in the excerpts of the declassified American documents published in

this paper where Nixon says India is not able to do much with foreign

aid because it lacks the drive and determination of the Japanese,

Germans or the Chinese. Then, on finding encouragement from Zhou, he

goes on to say, equally gratuitously,`...some people on the

Subcontinent, may be because of their environment, never had these

qualities'. If this leaves you in holy outrage, note that the

following sentence has been deleted. It obviously contained an

expletive, or something so disparaging (most likely about us) that

the declassifier found it unfit to be revealed even now. Any

speculation as to how insulting it may have been is set to rest by

Kissinger's immediate, mocking response, `The president meant the

American Indians'. The note-taker's postscript says, `Chou laughs'.

 

Generations of tension between competing cultures sometimes takes the

form of contempt and it is no surprise then that Zhou laughed

wickedly at Nixon's insult to India. We often laugh at the Chinese,

too. We dismiss their economic figures as lies in the extreme,

condemn their system as autocratic in the worst and caution the world

on the dangers of taking anything they say at face value. This denial

mode has grown recently as our own economic reform has hit some

bumps. Jaswant Singh has been vocal in expressing scepticism on the

accuracy of Chinese economic indicators in both his avatars, as

external affairs and finance minister.

 

The jury is still out as to what exactly had Defence Minister George

Fernandes called China in 1998: India's enemy No. 1, or Threat No. 1

or Potential Threat No. 1, and so on. But he has begun to see China

as a less formidable foe ever since he got interested in economics.

The underlying logic, evidently, was, don't expect India to move at

China's pace because that is a brutal dictatorship, this a liberal

democracy. You hear this all the time: that the Chinese can progress

because they have this brute, centralised authority vested in the

party which brooks no questioning. That they can even enforce a one-

child norm and here, in India, we cannot even advise all sections of

our population to breed slowly, without losing votes. That, in

essence, the Chinese are doing so much better because they have no

democracy so we should be grateful if we are getting somewhere in

spite of it. Nothing could be more self-defeating than this, nothing

more self-delusional and nothing a bigger lie.

 

 

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You hear this all the time: The Chinese are not doing as well as they

claim, even if they are doing a little better it is because we are

slowed by this scourge called democracy and they aren't. Not only do

we do our founding fathers a disservice, we give democracy a bad name

and drive ourselves deeper into the trap of what is, actually, a

double denial mode

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Yet, this is now becoming the accepted logic. The moment we are

compared unfavourably with China we respond with a rueful, `But we

have democracy...' In the process, not only do we do our founding

fathers a disservice, we give democracy a bad name and drive

ourselves deeper into the trap of what is, actually, a double denial

mode. This is how it reads: the Chinese are not doing as well as they

claim, even if they are doing a little better it is because we are

slowed by this scourge called democracy and they aren't.

 

To demolish this argument, let us first look at what people around

the world say. China is one of the most heavily researched nations in

the world of academia and think tanks and if there is one negative

almost all of them find in China, it is lack of democracy. Nobody,

repeat nobody, sees the Chinese authoritarianism as a strength or as

a pre-requisite or even a predisposing factor for their economic

growth. In fact, they see Chinese authoritarianism as a liability, a

time-bomb that will blight economic growth than drive it. This is the

opposite of the growing folklore in India.

 

Two essays in the authoritative publication Foreign Affairs over the

past year have made this same point in different ways. Writing in the

Sept/Oct 2002 issue, Carnegie Endowment's China scholar Minxin Pei

(his book, China's Trapped Transition: The Limits of Developmental

Autocracy is keenly awaited) mocks the Chinese system as `dot

Communism' which is `characterised by the marriage of a Leninist

party to bureaucratic capitalism with a globalist gloss'. He blames

lack of institutions, a modern, participatory system of decision-

making for what he calls as China's growing `governance deficit'. If

China doesn't democratise, he argues, this deficit will become

a `slow brewing crisis of governance (because of which) the current

economic dynamism may soon fade as long-term stagnation sets in'.

 

Or, listen to MIT China scholars George Gilboy and Eric Heginbotham

(July/Aug 2001) who believe the country will not be able to sustain

economic growth if it insists on delaying political reform. Every

nation that liberalises its economy, they believe, has had to

democratise its politics, South Korea, Mexico and Taiwan being the

prime examples. It is a slow process, they say, `nor is success

guaranteed'. They warn that in the absence of political reform (read

democratisation) the Chinese leadership could `botch the job...and if

it does...China of tomorrow could look more like today's Indonesia or

Yugoslavia rather than South Korea or Taiwan'.

 

This academic argument has been backed a great deal by renowned

international analysts and journalists. As well-known journalist Ian

Buruma (author of Bad Elements: Chinese Rebels From Los Angeles to

Beijing) warned in a recent Newsweek column, `the modern one-party

state, stripped of communist dogma, has nothing more to offer than

the dream of prosperity.' The subtext: If that promise is not kept

there will be chaos.

 

 

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The lack of democracy is a resurgent China's fundamental weakness,

not strength. Its presence is our strength but counts for nothing in

the absence of determination and direction. Each of us, therefore,

has built up its own, sizeable, governance deficit. How we tackle

that would determine how we square off a decade from now

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Why don't we then look at the equation differently? Maybe the Chinese

figures are not accurate but they still have a huge headstart over us

in the market-place. They have also done so on the back of a

ruthless, one-party, autocratic system that is increasingly

unsustainable. As their people become richer, they will ask more

questions. Westernised lifestyles will bring the yearning for Western-

style freedoms. They may even begin to question the one-child law,

which gives them a very lonely family universe with no siblings, no

cousins, no uncles, no aunts.

 

Today, the Chinese look unstoppable. At some point they will have to

pause and answer these questions, to find a democratic modus vivendi

with their people. We have been through that pain already. We've got

democracy, we need commitment and focus, qualities Nixon and Zhou

were so contemptuously sure we lacked. In essence, therefore, the

lack of democracy is a resurgent China's fundamental weakness, not

strength. Its presence is our strength but counts for nothing in the

absence of determination and direction. Each of us, therefore, has

built up its own, sizeable, governance deficit. How we tackle that

would determine how we square off a decade from now.

 

Back to the old question, then. Is China a threat, a rival, or an

enemy? The military equation is today passe. The era of grand

territorial wars is over. The currency of world power is now per

capita incomes and trade surpluses and not the megatonnage of your

nuclear arsenals. On this Diwali day, therefore, as we begin another

year in pursuit of Lakshmi, why not say China is none of the three?

It is competition. And competition brings opportunity. Except, we

will now compete for the same objective, but along different axes.

When the world talks of reforms in China now, it means political

reform. When it talks of reform in India, it means economics. If we

have to be worthy competitors, we must reform our economics faster

than the Chinese can clean up their politics. Each one of us has a

headstart in our own respective areas of strength but the positive

factor for us is that howsoever difficult economic reform is, it is

less traumatic than political transformation. Further, the logic of

history is encouraging: the most formidable competitors tend to grow

into partners rather than enemies, threats or rivals, with a stake in

each other's stability. The evolving US-China relationship is as good

as example as any.