India As Rising Power Meme, Needs To Be Squashed

People love to talk about how India is a rising power in Asia:

Upshot: America is done. Our once-great empire is cooked. Not only is China (and India, fast behind) about to stomp all over everyone in economic power and resource abuse, they already own a huge chunk of our debt, manufacture most of our holidays and build almost everything we like to buy. And that includes the device you are reading this on right now. Oh well. We'll always have football.

I'd submit to any writer who just looks at the raw statistics on Indian growth rates to actually visit the place. Take a look at the crumbling infrastructure. Reality looks a lot different on the ground.

Yes, I realize it is only a throwaway sentence by the writer, but still, it's propagating a meme that doesn't represent reality.

Now, there is a case to be made about China. I've seen a great deal of the country and there is a very real energy to succeed and get ahead there. And while many Chinese are mired in poverty, it isn't the kind of nasty, pervasive, grinding poverty to be found in India. In India if you are born poor there is virtually no chance you can rise in society. Not so in China. (Not to idealize the life of the poor in China, mind you. It's still extremely difficult to find real upward mobility in China. In India on the other? For all intents and purposes, such a concept doesn't even exist.)

Furthermore, culturally speaking the Chinese are much better when it comes to cultural or societal innovations than India is. For example: arranged marriages are still the norm in India. And the place of woman is rotten. In China? Not likely. Especially as the idea of romantic love spreads among young female factory workers with a disposable income. (Again, not to idealize often gruesome working conditions for these young women, and yet.)

India when it comes to culture, is probably the most extremely conservative place I have ever visited. Indians like to think they can compete with the Chinese, but they cannot. And we shouldn't buy the tripe that India is an emerging economic power. The only reason we do business with India is wage-arbitrage. It's cheaper to pay an Indian twenty five cents an hour for something a well-educated American would ask fifteen dollars or more for.

And yes, I realize I am a white, post-Colonial man of European descent making cultural judgments. Having visited both countries multiple times I am quite comfortable doing so.

Sean Paul Kelley November 2, 2009 - 3:46pm

Sean Paul Kelley's diary | printer friendly version |

( categories: Asia: South-West )

Downward mobility

Seems to me like we in the US are busy with downward mobility, as the money party does it's best to squeeze the middle class dry and send us into the underclass.

tla

tla November 2, 2009 - 5:49pm

Not to belittle your travel experience

Nevertheless both India and China are huge countries. India is especially an amalgam of many different cultures with a myriad of different spoken languages.

For instance there is a matrifocal ethnicity is Southern India. When first I heard about them I was told that this area of India that is matrifocal also enjoys the highest literacy rate. Arguably the role of women will be much better in that particular corner of India.

Generalizations are useful and sometimes necessary but given their sheer size and diversity I'd still be careful with sweeping statements about China and India.

quax November 2, 2009 - 5:51pm

I was thinking the same...

And I wonder how long it would take to get a somewhat balanced sample of countries like India and China.

creativelcro November 2, 2009 - 6:54pm

I would suggest years (more than 1)...

...this is based on my own experience and conversations with a number of long term expats. There are also many determiners; where one lives, how much daily interaction, and a knowledge of language. If one is in a tourist town or an enclave of mostly westerners then one may never learn a given culture. IMO.

"We're all of us children in a vast kindergarten trying to spell God's name with the wrong alphabet blocks." ~ Edwin Arlington Robinson

Celsius 233 November 2, 2009 - 11:15pm

I'd also have to agree...

...With more than 7 years in S.E. Asia; the complexities of culture and different social mores is not easy to grasp. Visits are visits and immersion is to discover and learn. Learning the language opens a whole perspective in itself.

"We're all of us children in a vast kindergarten trying to spell God's name with the wrong alphabet blocks." ~ Edwin Arlington Robinson

Celsius 233 November 2, 2009 - 8:20pm

from my little corner of the world

of dealing with temporary international workers I must say the Indian men are chauvinistic pigs. Every one I dealt with was the same, they really thought women were of a lower class and they all had problems dealing with female bosses and employees. Granted my prism is small, but very memorable.

Tina November 2, 2009 - 9:20pm

saw the same behaviour in Fiji

in July. I cringed a lot. Even the attitude of the Indian priest at Sunday Mass :(

Fortunately the native Fijians are better and their women are strong, hopefully their attitude will permeate across to the Indians.

graham November 2, 2009 - 9:30pm

Screw India....

...

creativelcro November 4, 2009 - 9:12am

Thomas Merton in 1968 lamented the crumbling

infrastructure in Calcutta, but was impressed by other regions.

It's a big country, still a developing nation, that remains at a low level on the UN Trade and Development Index. (USA 854, Malaysia 631, China 505, Vietnam 355, India 306, Pakistan 275 for comparisons)

Yet is in the top 5 military power rankings and one of the largest importer of arms.

A complex issue...

graham November 2, 2009 - 9:14pm

India and China on "Gendercide"

a short piece on Female Infanticide and Sex-Selective Abortion worth reading.

http://www.gendercide.org/case_infanticide.html

not much to chose between them, I would say- though the Chinese government has tried harder to turn this around.

_{I feel the American worker has been sacrificed to the capitalist idols in the ancient Mayan fashion. - Sue Lamb, NYT reader}

nymole November 2, 2009 - 10:59pm

Rats on Air India Plane

From BoingBoing:

You think you got problems, huh? Air India got real problems. One of them being rats on a plane. You know what I say? Enough is enough! I have had it with these motherfucking rats on this motherfucking plane!

The struggling government-owned carrier's already uneven reputation has been further tarnished in recent months by rats on a plane, a strike by senior pilots and a midair fistfight between pilots and flight attendants. In September, a flight to Riyadh was grounded after a passenger saw sparks coming from an engine.
Hey, sounds like a party to me. At Air India, Losses, Rats and a Brawl in the Sky

Jeff Wegerson November 2, 2009 - 11:19pm

Poverty

Is the undoing of both china and India. Added to the fact that there is no solid legal underpinning for property ownership based on laws and precedent. Ever try and run a business where you don't have clear ownership?

Scotjen61 November 3, 2009 - 8:01am

India is barely a "country"

India is barely a "country" and more like a federation of very different cultural groups lightly sharing a philosophical/religious social framework. Mobilizing "India" couldn't be done in the way Rove soundbitted the U.S. elite classes to war in 2002. There are many other reasons too many to list here. Many of the roads are more pothole than not.

stevelaudig November 3, 2009 - 8:44am

Reading voraciously has been my lifelong

substitute for all the travel I will spend my life never having been able to afford. That's okay. I've found so many treasures over the years.

One odd and chilling book I discovered long ago is a thing called Mother India. It is put together from accounts of India written by British and American doctors sometime around the 1900s.

It is one of the most ghastly things I've ever read. The part about those arranged marriages that I've never seen mentioned anywhere else, is how many of them are with girls much too young to be anyone's bride. I got the impression this was very commonplace in India at the time.

After finishing that book, the muslims of that era with their burkas and honor killings seemed clean and civilized by comparison.

someofparts November 3, 2009 - 8:47am

modern economies depend on so many things

Like property ownership rights. The countries with this you can just about count on your hands.

Like a middle class, and equal rights. Like public education to some standardized level. Like laws that apply equivalently and with a system of courts based on precedent. Like contract rights. Like a society that mostly knows and respects the laws and mores(even including traffic lights, shoplifting, and waiting in lines).

India has just about none of these things. China has just about none of these things. The Middle Eastern Countries are off the charts in terms of having none of the foundation for a modern economy. Africa barely has the familial structures for a modern economy, in that you have to have a family unit, or individual unit, structure to fit into a legal system. Not even Brazil or Mexico retains good property rights. Russia is basically a mafia.

Truly you can count on one hand all these pieces. Add to it a creative and creative/destructive culture and one can see why the US retains 30% of global economic activity.

Scotjen61 November 3, 2009 - 1:20pm

Personally, I don't think that the kind of absolute property

rights you are discussing are absolutely essential to a modern economy. Take China for example: it's a very statist economy in that consumer goods are free to the people, but the strategic development is directed in many sense by the government. Benefits accrue to China for this very reason. But then again, I'm a closet socialist, so . . .

^{"All men's gains are the fruit of venturing."}

-Herodotus

Sean Paul Kelley November 3, 2009 - 2:11pm

China's System

is failing for precisely that reason.

The inability to hold basic property rights is what keeps the poor locked out of the capital markets. In modern economies with property rights the home becomes the primary bedrock of capital access and provides the initial seed money for endeavors. The ability to own your business, to own the property of your business provides the next layer of access to capital for growing your business.

In Chana all you can do is curry favor with politically connected people. It has created a highly corrupt culture. It contributes to the substitution of toxic parts and ingredients to the products that are made. It contributes to the abject poverty and pollution of the workers. Who is liable? The State. There is no personal culpability.

Citizens in China are not allowed to travel freely. I cannot be from the southern provinces say and travel to Beijing without my appropriate papers. I do not have a say over the school I will go to or if I will go to school. I do not have any say whatsoever if Beijing decides to 'move' my city. I am moved without compensation and relocated in a place not of my choosing, given a job not of my choosing. It would take a very long time for someone from the U.S. to get used to.

Scotjen61 November 4, 2009 - 5:42pm

Your statement about

Your statement about homeownership is simply false. Take a look at percentage of homes owned versus rented across all of the wealthiest countries and then tell me there is any correlation whatsoever between homeownership and wealth.

That China is a rapidly transforming society providing extraordinary opportunities to the bright, energetic and talented seems to have escaped your attention. That they still have a very, very long way to go doesn't seem particularly extraordinary considering where they are starting from. And I don't particularly care if you choose as your starting point 1948 say or the immediate aftermath of the cultural revolution.

And just how much choice do you have as to the school you will go to if you are say, poor and trapped in one of America's many, many backwaters from the inner city to appalachia, etc., etc?

hvd November 5, 2009 - 12:15pm

Further as to the myth of

Further as to the myth of home ownership. In colonial America home ownership brought with it the means of production, i.e. land on which you could grow your own food, cut your own timber, tan your leather etc. That was, in contrast to Europe where this was well nigh unto impossible a great source of real wealth.

Now take your suburban tract home the value of which is tied to ponzi markets over which you have so very much control. A truly liberating sort of wealth. Or is it not, much more a new type of servitude.

hvd November 5, 2009 - 12:20pm

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India As Rising Power Meme, Needs To Be Squashed

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