India in 1947 invested in freedom of thought, democracy, and gradual donning away with archaic customs (only) wherever needed, with overall gentleness. Or should I say, this has been nothing new with India, happening since eternity. Without mega turbulence, maybe with intermediate evolution-revolutions as needed like the freedom movement till 1947. Business as usual.
This is clearly an unclosed chapter at this point. Many alternative futures could work out. Say, with machines doing more and more work including that of building machines, that part hopefully will get commoditised, along with the core science and infra behind that. And innovative controlled employment of those advances for societal benefits will become the need. Grassroot level, day-to-day creativity and innovation will be the mantra. Who could tell? All analysis is in hindsight anyways.
Even the current fear around India moving towards some authoritarian regimented society is nonsense. Society will not let it happen. They have tasted the blood of freedom. Often at the cost of discipline, progress, economy, basic survival.
They do seem to cling hard their religion, gods, spirituality though!
Though the cotton mill productivity does challenge the idea that it’s genetics or something inherent. Interesting problem for sure.
India's diversity is not its strength -whereas China's relative homogeneity allows for easier governance(no contending non-pluralistic factions)
India's federation is not its strength either. India's central government, unlike the Chinese, cannot unilaterally execute national plans. [in his example, they can't modernize a single international hub without having a fight that engenders delay and even kills projects]
They don’t have the appetite to be socially modern anyway. Every Indian passport still has the holder’s parents’ name within (in Indian bureaucracy your parents seem to essentially own you regardless of age), which as TFA contends ties them to a social unit in a way that hampers the fungibility needed for smooth industrialization. Is it possible to argue that the central government doesn’t control even the passport it issues itself? It’s obvious that the motivation is simply absent, same as it was nearly a hundred years ago.
You can design the best policies in the world, but it’s local governments that actually implement them.
The Great Chinese Famine was a prime example of this. Mao became the scapegoat, but he wasn’t as detached from reality or as blindly idealistic as many people make him out to be. His mistake was treating local governments the way he treated the military - giving them significant autonomy, making them compete and trusting the information they reported back to him.
It turned out that politicians were far more corrupt than military generals. Local officials lied about food production and greatly exaggerated output figures to gain promotions. As a result, the country sold more grain than it actually had, contributing to widespread famine and millions of deaths.
When Deng returned to power and began reforming the country, he famously toured China city by city to ensure that local governments understood the message and stop fk around this time.
To outsiders, it may seem that China can move quickly simply because the central government holds a great deal of power. That is certainly true compared with many other systems of governance. However, what really enables rapid policy implementation is the alignment between the central and local governments. Without that alignment, you would see the central government issue one policy but local government adds lots of red tapes and nothing really gets done in the end
I think seeing it as an “align”-ment problem puts too much blame on the local side. Also, autonomy has nothing to do with the problem of misalignment.
In authoritarian systems like China, mis-alignment with authority can carry serious political and social risks, so people are easily pushed toward dishonesty. What happened under the Mao’s rule is simply this; local officials were too afraid of criticizing the very father of the revolution, which could be interpreted as attacking the legitimacy of the revolution itself. It was a side effect of over-concentration, and gaining more control over local would have not made any differences.
Deng was successful only because he was exactly aware of this problem. In his speeches on the government reform (the Open-Door policy), he explicitly pointed out over-concentration as a major issue. He not only eased the concentration of power, but also redesigned the incentive structure, so that officials can adopt objective measures and even try their own experiments.
Here's me Lee: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QaTNpw0-wAk
Genuinely amazed you apparently study Indian history but don't know how to spell Gandhi. Sorry for nitpicking.
On the other hand, India’s progress continues to be hobbled by deep-rooted social challenges, including religious extremism, caste-based inequality, utter breakdown of civic culture, social fragmentation, linguistic chauvinism and regional rivalries.
Forced order or complete chaos. Choose your pick.
It is still true today as Lky said 50ish years ago. The bureaucracy of India is federalized yet overly centralized.
When the city governor must ask for permission to their own money from the federal when yet they are so far away, there is nothing efficient. The powers are yet so powerful yet blind at the same time.
For India, the choice was either an endless cycle of balkanization, bloodshed and anarchy à la Sub-Saharan Africa with a mild possibility of some of the states eventually thriving economically, or an inherited weak but held-together nation-state with a bit more negotiating power in the world stage.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_administrative_divisio...
It will be interesting to see how the current US War on education changes the country in 20 years. Will a similar but opposite article be written about the US in a few decades ?
China liberalized their economy in the 70s: 1976 Mao dies -> Cultural revolution ends -> 1978 Deng Xiaoping launches 'Reform & Opening Up'.
India liberalized their economy in the 90s: 1991 Rao and Singh come to power -> eliminate tariffs, dismantle the License Raj.
The difference is at least that of compounded growth over time. At 7% real growth, in 13 years an economy gains about 2.4x. In PPP terms, China's economy is about 2.4x India's [1].
Additional factors to consider are that China liberalized more aggressively through state directed experimentation, and India liberalized more gradually, and within a democratic legal system. Also, on the Chinese side there were periods of slowdown (1989, others), and on the Indian side the economy would have been about 20% larger but for the right-wing/fascist policies of the BJP government [2][3]. But policy failures on both sides are probably a wash, bringing us to today's gap.
[1] https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/NGDP_RPCH@WEO/OEMDC/...
[2] https://www.hks.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/centers/cid/...
[3] https://www.nationalheraldindia.com/india/ill-conceived-demo...
China calls it “iron and salt” I think. The state makes very large investments in infrastructure and helps build huge globally competitive conglomerates in strategic and bedrock industries. The state builds the “iron.” Then it allows the free market to do the “salt,” because while big state enterprise is good at doing stuff like mass steel production or the three gorges dam it’s horrible at making consumer goods or filling small niches.
(The USSR tried to have the state do the iron and the salt.)
America started doing this in a big way with the railroads. Then came roads, aviation, petroleum, electrification of the entire country, bringing clean water and sanitation to the whole country, huge public works projects, the interstate highway system, the space program, DARPAnet, and so on.
Then we stopped doing this kind of bedrock investment, being sold on the idea that it’s not necessary. Then we lost our lead in all industries except… the ones we still do this in like aerospace.
Where's environmentalism and financializationn in all this?
We didn't "just" stop. We didn't close all those steel plants and whatnot for fun.
Can’t speak for the rest, but we still subsidize airlines and the infrastructure to make it possible.
As we should.
All of the little industrialists and VCs here on HN wouldn’t have a prayer of striking it rich without the median income workers paying (hard-carrying) your little dreams.
India is scamming everybody, and getting very rich at it.
What should India do to beat China?
Invest in education?
Exterminate millions of its own (undereducated) population in meaningless wars and poorly–planned public works?
Make their women burn their bras?
Switch Communism in for Hinduism and end Democracy?
Other than the first, I think I'd rather bow down to China.
English is a major reason- Indians are just better at speaking English than Chinese and thrives in corporate America. Whereas mainland Chinese couldn't climb the corporate ladder and have to seek better opportunities back in China.
Find me a tech executive in a Big Tech firm who is from mainland China. You can't find one. Both Lisa Su of AMD and Jensen Huang of Nvidia are Taiwanese immigrants who grew up in US in the 70s and thus speak fluent English.