CAN THE ELEPHANT DANCE WITH THE DRAGON?
Shashi Tharoor
The Times of India, April 20, 2008
It has become rather fashionable these days, in bien-pensant circles in the West, to speak of India and China in the same breath. These are the two big countries said to be taking over the world, the new contenders for global eminence after centuries of Western domination, the Oriental answer to generations of Occidental economic success. Two new books have even come out, explicitly twinning the two countries: Forbes magazine correspondent Robyn Meredith's "The Elephant and the Dragon: The Rise of India and China and What It Means for All of Us" and Harvard business professor Tarun Khanna's "Billions of Entrepreneurs: How China and India are Reshaping their Futures — and Yours". Both books, though different in scope and tone, see the recent rise of India and China as literally shifting the world's economic and political tectonic plates. Jairam Ramesh's famous notion of "Chindia" has evidently come to roost in the American imagination.
The Times of India, April 20, 2008
It has become rather fashionable these days, in bien-pensant circles in the West, to speak of India and China in the same breath. These are the two big countries said to be taking over the world, the new contenders for global eminence after centuries of Western domination, the Oriental answer to generations of Occidental economic success. Two new books have even come out, explicitly twinning the two countries: Forbes magazine correspondent Robyn Meredith's "The Elephant and the Dragon: The Rise of India and China and What It Means for All of Us" and Harvard business professor Tarun Khanna's "Billions of Entrepreneurs: How China and India are Reshaping their Futures — and Yours". Both books, though different in scope and tone, see the recent rise of India and China as literally shifting the world's economic and political tectonic plates. Jairam Ramesh's famous notion of "Chindia" has evidently come to roost in the American imagination.
Personally, count me amongst the sceptics. It's not just that, aside from the fact that both countries occupy a rather vast landmass called "Asia", they have very little in common. It's also that the two countries are already at very different stages of development — China started its liberalization a good decade and a half before India, shot up faster, hit double-digit growth when India was still hovering around 5%, and with compound growth, has put itself in a totally different league from India, continuing to grow faster from a larger base. And it's also that the two countries' systems are totally dissimilar. If China wants to build a new six-lane expressway, it can bulldoze its way past any number of villages in its path; in India, if you want to widen a two-lane road, you could be tied up in court for a dozen years over compensation entitlements. When China built the Three Gorges dam, it created a 660-kilometer long reservoir that necessitated the displacement of a staggering 2 million people, all accomplished in 15 years without a fuss in the interests of generating electricity; when India began the Narmada Dam project, aiming to bring irrigation, drinking water and power to millions, it has spent 34 years (so far) fighting environmental groups, human rights activists, and advocates for the displaced all the way to the Supreme Court, while still being thwarted in the streets by the protesters of the Narmada Bachao Andolan. That is how it should be; we are a fractious democracy, China is not. But let us not even pretend we can compete in the global growth stakes with China.
(...) [artículo aquí]
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