If I could choose, would I rather be born Indian or Chinese?
And Mao Keji on how democracy has served India
Dear Gobal Jigsaw,
Given the backdrop of a potential rapprochement between China and India at a time of what will surely be tectonic shifts in global alliances I am publishing a serialized interview with one of China’s leading India-focused scholars, Mao Keji. Today’s newsletter, the third in this series, will look at Mao’s answer to the question of whether he sees India’s democracy as having played a positive roe in the country’s development.
The answer will be behind a paywall, so please do upgrade to a paid subscription to read his take.
But before we get to the interview, here is an excerpt from my 2008 book, Smoke and Mirrors, in which I attempted to answer a similar question by posing it thus: “If I could choose, would I rather be born Indian or Chinese?”
Here is what I felt back then. (I can’t wait to update my thoughts many years down the road, when I return to Beijing this August.)
Let me know in the comments how you imagine you might answer that question.
“The question I faced with greatest frequency was at once the crudest and perhaps most difficult of all to answer. ‘Which is better? India or China?’ taxi drivers in Beijing had asked me with monotonous regularity. ‘Do you prefer India or China?’ my students at the Beijing Broadcasting Institute had often queried. ‘Do you like living in Beijing? Or was it better in Delhi?’ my hutong neighbours enquired when they got the opportunity.
This last question in its various forms was one that I spent much thought grappling with. My answers were as variable as the day the question was posed. Following conversations with Lou Ya and other toilet cleaners in my neighbourhood, I would think back to the wretched jamadarnis (sweepers) back home and marvel at the relative dignity of labour that China’s lowliest enjoyed. In my hutong, the refuse collectors wore gloves when picking up the garbage on their daily rounds. This single, simple article of protective clothing and the barrier it created between bacteria and skin gave them at least a modicum of self-respect. Their children almost always went to school. They may not have been well educated themselves but could usually read and write enough to avoid the worst kind of exploitation.
These were modest gains and not everyone in China could claim even such moderate progress. But were I one of the millions-strong legions of cleaners, sweepers, janitors or night soil workers in India, I would probably prefer by some twist of karma to have been born Chinese.
But on other days I felt differently. There were days when I spent hours hunting for a Chinese source amongst the country’s think tanks, universities and research institutes for fresh insight or an alternative point of view on an issue for a story I had been working on. It was always such dishearteningly hard work.
China’s was a pragmatic society and over the years I met any number of people blessed with more than usual amounts of a canny, street-smart, intelligence. As evidenced by the Zhejiang entrepreneurs, ordinary Chinese were masters of locating the loophole, of finding escape routes, of greasing the right hands and bypassing stifling regulations. If need be, they could sell contact lenses to a blind woman and chicken feet to a vegetarian.
But while it may have abounded with consummate salespeople and irrepressible entrepreneurs, Chinese society remained anti-intellectual. More the product of a political and educational system that discouraged criticism and encouraged groupthink than a primordial characteristic, this was the one aspect of China I found most wearying. It was the absence of a passion for ideas, the lack of delight in argument for its own sake, and the dearth of reasoned but brazen dissent that most often gave me cause for homesickness.
In China, those who disagreed with mainstream, officially sanctioned views outside of the parameters set by mainstream officially sanctioned debate, more often than not found themselves branded as dissidents – suspect, hunted, under threat. A professor who misspoke to a journalist could suddenly be demoted. An editor who pursued a corruption investigation too zealously might find herself fired. A lawyer, who simply tried to help his client to the best of his abilities could, were the client of the wrong sort, ironically land in jail himself.
In universities the idea was drilled into students’ heads that there were right answers and wrong answers. While ambiguity and nuances may have been both sensed and exploited in practice, on a purely intellectual plane there was scant space for them. For an argumentative Indian from a country where heterodoxy was the norm, this enforced homogeneity in Chinese thought and attitude scratched against my natural grain. There were thus occasions when despite all of India’s painful shortcomings, I would assert with conviction that it was better to be an Indian than endure the stifling monotony of what tended to pass as an intellectual life in China.
But then I would return to Delhi for a few days and almost immediately long to be back in Beijing where a woman could ride a bus or even drive a bus without having to tune out the constant staring of the dozens of sex-starved youth that constantly swarmed around the Indian capital’s streets. Later, however, I might switch on the TV and catch an ongoing session of the Indian Parliament, not always the most inspirational of bodies but when looked at with China-habituated eyes, more alluring than usual.
China’s economic achievement over the last 30 or so years may have been unparalleled historically, but so was India’s political feat. Its democracy was almost unique amongst post-colonial states not simply for its existence, but its existence against all odds in a country held together not by geography, language or ethnicity but by an idea. This was an idea that asserted, even celebrated, the possibility of multiple identities. In India you could, and were expected to be, both many things and one thing simultaneously.
I was thus a Delhite, an English speaker, half a Brahmin, half a Tamilian, a Hindu culturally, an atheist by choice, a Muslim by heritage. But the identity that threaded these multiplicities together was at once the most powerful and most amorphous: I was an Indian.
India’s great political achievement was in its having developed mechanisms for negotiating large-scale diversity along with the inescapable corollary of frequent and aggressive disagreement. The guiding and perhaps lone consensus that formed the bedrock of that mechanism was that in a democracy you don’t really need to agree – except on the ground rules of how you will disagree.
All of which being true still did not help to definitively answer the question, ‘If I could choose, would I rather be born Indian or Chinese?’
Perhaps part of my problem was that unlike how students were educated in China into believing there were right and wrong answers, I had been encouraged to do precisely the opposite. ‘Always problematise’, my earnest, khadi kurta clad professor, Sankaran, used to thunder at us during class back in my undergraduate days as a philosophy student in Delhi.
But if forced to reply in broad brush strokes I would assert the following: Were I to be able to ensure being born even moderately well-off, I would probably plump for India over China.
In India, money allowed you to exist happily enough despite the constant failure of governments to deliver services. Most Delhi households that could afford it had private generators for when the electricity failed, and private tube wells in their gardens to ensure the water supply that the municipality couldn’t. The police offered little protection from crime, so many households hired private security guards.
Having developed the necessary private channels with which to deal with the lack of public goods one was free in India to enjoy the intellectual pleasures of discussing the nature of ‘the idea of India’ or to enjoy the heady adrenaline rush of winning a well-argued debate. These were real pleasures and freedoms, and their broader significance was not merely confined to the elite. A tradition of argumentation was fundamental to India’s secularism and democratic polity, with wide-ranging implications for all sections of society.
On the other hand, were I to be born poor, I would take my chances in authoritarian China, where despite lacking a vote, the likelihood of my being decently fed, clothed and housed were considerably higher. Crucially, China would present me with greater opportunities for upward socio-economic mobility. So that even though I may have been born impoverished, there was a better chance I wouldn’t die as wretched in China, as in India.
This was not to deny the importance of the vote for India’s poor, which undoubtedly endowed them with collective bargaining power. Dislocating large numbers of people to make way for big infrastructure projects, for example, was an uphill task for any Indian government. As a result, the kind of wanton destruction of large swathes of a historic city like Beijing, justified by the hosting of a sporting event, would be unlikely to occur in India.
In China on the other hand, not only did the poor lack a vote, but the authorities were also adept at disabling the capacity of disaffected peoples to organize, thus depriving them of the influence of numbers that could pressure government policy through other means.
However, it was also patent that in India the right to vote did not necessarily, or even usually, translate into better governance. Fear of alienating a vote-bank might persuade a local politician to turn a blind eye to illegal encroachment by migrants on city land. But the ensuing slum would lack even the most rudimentary facilities like sewage or water supply.
Citizens threw out governments in India with predictable regularity. The country’s vast poor majority dismissed on average four out of five incumbents, so that what was called the anti-incumbency factor was possibly the most crucial in any Indian election. Often celebrated as a sign of India’s robust democracy what this state of affairs in fact reflected was a track record of governance that was so abysmal that even in regions where incomes had improved and poverty reduced, people believed this was in spite and not because of the government. (NB: These observations are pre-Modi)
Ultimately, despite political representation for the poor in India and the absence of political participation in China, the latter trumped India when it came to the delivery of basic public goods like roads, electricity, drains, water supplies and schools where teachers actually show up. This counterintuitive situation was linked to the fact that while in China the CCP derived its legitimacy from delivering growth, in India a government derived its legitimacy simply from its having been voted in. Delivering on its promises was thus less important than the fact of having been elected.
The legitimacy of democracy in many ways absolved Indian governments from the necessity of performing. The CCP could afford no such luxury. As a result the Chinese government was more responsive to the socio-economic problems confronting it than it was often given credit for.
And now on to today’s Q and A with Mao Keji in which he reflects about India’s strengths and weaknesses, summing these up thus: “India possesses first-world aspirations, values, and institutions, but operates with third-world economic resources, social conditions, and governance capabilities.”
PA:Do you believe that democracy has served India well or that democracy has held India back?
MK: This is an excellent question, and it's something I've pondered extensively. First, I believe that competitive, multiparty electoral democracy has undoubtedly made immense contributions to India's nation-building, governmental stability, and political development. Compared to many other developing countries, India's political system has performed remarkably well in terms of continuity, robustness, and independence.