Hails, comrades. This is the first of my two concluding entries in this blog. The purpose is for this Slav to consider India holistically in light of both my education and my observations and, of course, to have the last word.
When I was born nearly 22 long years ago, my title could only have referred to the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. Times may have changed, but I've heard the more things change, the more they stay the same and though new missiles may sit in different silos and point in different directions, they're still capped with radioactive holocaust... a cheerful thought for a summer day.
I'm not really here to discuss that. If you want to hear about "grand strategies" and "geopolitical maneuvering" turn on CNN or Fox News. Every day these capitalist roaders inundate us with more useless garbage about the national competition between China and India and why Americans should fear both countries. Maybe I'm just terribly brave, but I don't really have time to fear the malnourished and the illiterate.
So, if I reject all this media hype, why do I want to compare India and China? First, they have the largest populations and both face similar problems as a result. Second, they have both experienced incredible economic growth lately (aka the rich have gotten richer and the poor, well, who cares anyway?) and may be developing American-style middle-classes. Third, I've now spent more time both places than most of the talking heads who make these dire predictions.
Despite the many similarities between the current developmental situations of China and India, the differences strike me as far more interesting, and I'm not just talking about what kind of sauce goes on one's rice. Being me, let's start with a bit of history. China has long had an unearned reputation in the West for being culturally monolithic. This is largely due to white people thinking all Chinese people look and sound the same. Early European sinologists had not the subtlety to recognize the intense regional variation across "China." In fact, many have argued that the idea of China as a single ethnicity or nation has no meaning until after the 16th century or later still, much later than many of us would think. Let us admit, however, that China has fewer major social cleavages (no major religious tensions and few large ethnic minorities), at least today, than India. India seems so fractious and fraught with religious and ethnic tensions that all Europeans often see is conflict. Once again, this intellectual extreme is inaccurate and ignores surprising unity across religious, ethnic, and caste lines as demonstrated by the diverse if corrupt Congress Party. Still, China, for a host of reasons many of which are connected to the common written language, has historically been far more unified than India.
This fact largely determined how European interaction first occurred. We often hear that China was never colonized, which is incredibly misleading. The Europeans and Japanese carved up China into various spheres of influence and controlled China's ports and shipping from the safety of their fortified from the early 19th century. The key, however, is that no single power could subjugate China. The British, French, Germans, Japanese, Russians, Italians, Dutch, Portuguese, and even good old Americans (all of whom usually fought each other) had to pool their resources just to lock down a few ports. Between them, they dismembered a relatively unified country.
In India, we see the exact opposite. The strong regional kingdoms which sprang up in the 18th century after the Mughal collapse (in the east: Bengal, northeast: Awadh, central: Hyderabad, and southwest: Mysore to name a few) had divided the old Empire. Their dominions took on more logical boundaries based around language groups. One cannot stress enough the primacy of India's regional cultures. To the extent one can speak of “Indian” culture at all, it is a development of the last 60 years. Even today, many "Indians" prefer to think of themselves first as Bengalis or Tamils or etc. Taking advantage of this disunity, the British picked off provinicial nawabs (governors) one by one. Some would argue the British did not simply unite India, they created it. No previous hegemon had ever gained control over the entire subcontinent. In China, shared language (at least written) and the civil service had been indigenous forces for unity. In India, the first shared language from north to south was and is English and the civil service was the one established by the British East India Company.
This distinction has been a crucial one in the 20th century. When faced with foreign invasion, the Chinese could rally behind what they at least imagined to be their shared past and culture. South Asians had to invent a new culture which embraced regions with few common features and also rejected the culture of their imperial overlords, a process which has yielded mixed results.
Now the question is what does all this mean today? Well, quite simply, China is wiping the floor with India by almost every quantitative measure from GDP to literacy rate. While China is far more regionally varied and locally controlled than most people realize, the chief ideology has almost always been determined at the center. Even in times of rebellion, the rebels usually just aped the “legitimate” dynasty. In 1949 when the Communist Party took power, it set about breaking a social system 5,000 years old, which it did with incredible success. I would argue this was a major step forward for the millions of Chinese peasants who had lived under the feudal yoke for a hundred generations, however, they had to replace Confucianism and the other traditions with something… a ha, Maoism or as it is more correctly known Mao Zedong Thought. We could bicker and argue about the virtues of this new code, but at least it was something. In 1980 Deng Xiaoping began sweeping Maoism away, but this time he offered no replacement. The Chinese had broken too many links to go back to pre-1949 ideologies, so they turned to the only avenue left, rampant capitalism. As the great socialist Deng said, “To get rich is glorious,” and I’ll be damned if that didn’t take off. That has given us modern China where nothing, not environmental disaster nor industrial calamity is allowed to slow the march of progress. For now, this has put China on top.
And while I joke about how much Indians love cricket and the extent to which the upper-classes emulate the British, India’s diversity (or disunity) has successfully resisted the more culturally Americanizing tendencies of global capitalism. Indian society still has its many religions to hold it together, not to mention huge kinship networks (such networks were dismantled by the landlord purges, land redistribution, and on-child policy in China). On the downside, India also has communal violence and vestiges of the caste system, but at least there are social forces at work outside the state. The British never really transformed Indian society, just a few specific segments of it.
At this point, China is hanging together by the will of the People’s Liberation Army. Most other social and cultural networks have dissolved completely. The fall, when it comes, will be ugly. In India, I often feel like not much would change tomorrow if the government disappeared. Sure, there would be problems (actually it would be interesting because the government doesn’t seem to do a whole hell of a lot now), but society would go on as it has, for better and for worse as I said before. Talking to people in China depressed me because of the obsession with money, and I’m not just talking about the poor in which case one could more readily understand. In India, people still have other goals and values and concerns. For me, that is the real difference between China and India today. Indians have identities in which the state and bank account play a minimal role, whereas that’s about all the Chinese have left.
Now playing: "The Internationale" - Tang Dynasty. Here is the symbolic last gasp of Chinese idealism. It basically fell in a bloody heap with the students fleeing Tiananmen Square. This is China's first "metal" band (I don't know if I'd call them metal, but they're sick anyway) singing the international workers' anthem in Berlin circa 1989.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=rx7A3UYKXj4&mode=related&search=
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