Eye on China: India helps to keep China in context

One of the most exciting developments for any China watcher is what's going on over in India. Most observers in China tend to be quite one-dimensional.

Given the time and effort it takes to learn Chinese and establish good contacts, many observers here tend to lose sight of the extreme importance of context. You can't observe China intelligently without putting it into context and India is a wonderful country to use as a comparison.

I have just started getting interested in the subject and have been blown away by the sheer wealth of excellent material on India.

Clearly, 300 years of mostly peaceful intercourse with the West, being colonised by Britain and having a strong pro-British colonial legacy have all enabled a level of debate completely lacking in China.

If you look at the most recent books on China, they fall in the camp of business manuals and journalistic memoirs. Some of the latter are good but some like Peter Hessler's ponderous tome Oracle Bones serve to mystify as much as enlighten.

In contrast, I was glancing through a book by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala the other day and just the introduction had me filling the margins of the book with a series of approving ticks.

The problem is that nobody really combines expertise about both sub-continents. There's a book waiting to be written.

While both countries have a plethora of similarities, it's where they diverge that it becomes interesting. India has always had a pro-Western elite. The British were successful at working with the elite, in stark contrast to the existentialist confusion and sheer horror that Westerners provoked among the Chinese.

In an interesting account of a visit up the Yangtze River in 1897, Isabella Bishop describes how prominent the highly-literate official class was in leading anti-Western xenophobia.

The Chinese elite were far less pragmatic and agile than the Indian elite in recognising that a new, fearsome and enduring power matrix was being established around them.

Another glaring divergence is the role of the state. Superficially, it appears that the Indian state is considerably weaker than the Chinese one. There may be some truth to that argument if one looks at tax raised as a proportion of GDP, where the Chinese Government is doing a better job than the Indian Government.

Yet the monolithic appearance of the Chinese state, skilled at hiding fissures, is misleading. At ground level, the constant complaint is about the weakness of the central government in forcing through its policies at local level.

Westerners should beware of the glib opinion that a tyrannical government can push through policies that would not be accepted in the West. The central government in China often struggles to get the support of its corrupt and often incompetent local administration.

This begs the question of democracy, which many business observers see as an Indian weakness, at least relative to China. Yet broadly speaking, I can only see that democracy in India has correctly fulfilled its core function, namely providing economic benefits to the electorate in return for their vote.

The effect on India's poor has undoubtedly been beneficial. The need to "buy" votes through the provision of schools and hospitals and positive discrimination for the poorest castes is providing a degree of social mobility completely absent among China's peasantry.

The latter have no one to champion them - since nobody needs their vote. What's given to the Chinese peasantry takes the form of charity underpinned by fear, which is not a healthy combination.

One could argue that China is far more homogenous than India's culture and, therefore, has less chance of falling apart than a country with dozens of castes, languages and tribes.

There is a lot of sense in this. The Chinese are divided by geography and language rather than the more intractable differences of philosophy and religion. The question is, how far can the Chinese Government go in its pursuit of economic strength without giving a greater share of the spoils to the weaker members of its population?

In Singapore, the authoritarian model worked because of the awesome personal integrity of the city's founders, which ensured that all members of society got some share of the spoils. In contrast, the political apparatus of China is neither clean nor fair, thus creating a pressure cooker of resentment.

If the Indian state really has been weakened by democracy, then that will be a lesson to Chinese bureaucrats to shy away from political reform. The Chinese state, even if internally divided, still provides a difficult barrier.

Buying favours in the great cities is a relatively subtle affair but it can easily become outright extortion in the smaller cities.

Interestingly, the level of corruption in China appears to be rising as the country's wealth increases. China's example would suggest that corruption can be compatible with economic modernisation in the early stages.

This tallies with the experience of British-run Hong Kong, which was deeply corrupt until the early 1980s. This corruption coincided with powerful growth. But if such corruption had not been finally cleaned up in the 1980s, it's unlikely that Hong Kong would have succeeded its transition from a manufacturing economy to a service economy.

These two rapidly-evolving countries have far less to do with each other than with the West. Soon, they will be looking at each other more carefully. It's in the nature of civilisations to compete, but the winner in this race is too hard to spot.

* Eye on China is a journalist based in Beijing.