In both countries recently, highly publicized gang rapes have dramatically raised public awareness of a hidden problem. Of course, rape is to some extent a hidden issue everywhere, even in societies with efficient legal systems and liberal attitudes toward women. But in China and India, as in other places where traditional notions may judge a raped woman as “ruined,” there are especially powerful disincentives to reporting the crime, experts say.

Here are the painful stories. On Dec. 16, a 23-year-old student was gang-raped on a bus in New Delhi, the Indian capital, dying of her injuries two weeks later.

Few believe that’s the full extent of it, but the Chinese conviction figure is apparently higher than India’s. Women in China also experience far less sexual harassment in public, or “Eve teasing,” as it’s known in India.

Privately, researchers confide they have no idea what the real number of rapes is. Some estimate that less than one in 10 cases is reported. That might make at least a quarter of a million a year in China, but probably far more. In the United States, with less than a quarter of China’s population, Census Bureau figures show a fairly consistent rate of “forcible rape” (excluding statutory rape) of just over 80,000 a year over the last decade.

CDT previously reported on the detention of Li Guanfeng, son of People’s Liberation Army General and renowned singer, Li Shuangjiang, for his alleged involvement in a gang rape case. In response to this case, the Global Times published two commentaries: Freelance columnist Lian Peng claims there needs to be a fundamental cure for society by strengthening the law, while Xiao Baiyou,  ”Wolf Dad,” says parents need to be stricter with their children. Lian Peng says:

On the one hand, the case mirrors social hatred toward officials and the rich. These deeply rooted social conflicts are worth pondering. There are too many cases in which the privileged are seen to fly above the law. People worry that if they do not strongly condemn this action, Li Tianyi might receive a lighter sentence or even escape legal punishment altogether.

If social order and justice are not done and crimes are not punished, the psychology of the people will be gradually distorted and social conflicts and hatred will spread. But the very first step is to practically restore the dignity of the law. Under this circumstance, a spirit of social tolerance, sympathy and understanding can return.

While Xiao Baiyou comments on parents’ responsibility:

This largely relates to poor family education. Because of unreasonable parental discipline, they go astray. Some among these groups despise the law, because they believe they are privileged and can easily escape from legal punishment.

I can responsibly say that if I was allowed to teach Li Tianyi from today on, I would return the Li couple a well-disciplined son who would have learned from his crimes.

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The incident and the protests in New Delhi in recent days have received wide attention in China. While the brutal attack was initially highlighted by Communist Party-run outlets as indicative of the failures of India’s democratic system to ensure stability, the following protests in New Delhi triggered calls from pro-reform bloggers for the Chinese government to learn from India and to allow the public to express its voice.

The rape case was one of the most discussed topics in Chinese microblogs over the past week, prompting thousands of posts and comments. By Sunday, however, the authorities appeared to move to limit the debate: on Monday, a search for the topic triggered a message on Sina Weibo – a popular Twitter-equivalent used by more than 300 million people – saying the results could not be displayed according to regulations. The message is usually seen as an indicator of a topic being censored by the authorities.

[…] That Communist Party media outlets and academics often point to India’s “disorderliness” as an outcome of the democratic system and to justify one-party rule is a sore point among many liberal Chinese who are pushing for democratic reforms.

Western responses have also come under fire: Emer O’Toole wrote at The Guardian that media commentary focusing on cultural rather than political issues has frequently displayed “uncomfortably neocolonial” attitudes.

In a recent essay at Foreign Affairs, Eric X. Li argued that Chinese authoritarianism has proven its superiority over democracy, while at The New Republic, Pankaj Mishra lamented India’s “budding likeness to China—the onset, in particular, of an informal authoritarianism in the hollow shell of a formal democracy” (both via CDT).

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CHINA IS shakily authoritarian while India is a stable democracy—indeed, the world’s largest. So goes the cliché, and it is true, up to a point. But there is a growing resemblance between the two countries. A decade after we were told that China and India were “flattening” the world, expediting a historically inevitable shift of power from West to East, their political institutions and original nation-building ideologies face a profound crisis of legitimacy. Both countries, encumbered with dynastic elites and crony capitalists, are struggling to persuasively reaffirm their founding commitments to mass welfare. Protests against corruption and widening inequality rage across their vast territories, while their economies slow dramatically.

If anything, public anger against India’s political class appears more intense, and disaffection there assumes more militant forms, as in the civil war in the center of the country, where indigenous, Maoist militants in commodities-rich forests are battling security forces. India, where political dynasties have been the rule for decades, also has many more “princelings” than China—nearly 30 percent of the members of parliament come from political families. As the country intensifies its crackdown on intellectual dissent and falls behind on global health goals, it is mimicking China’s authoritarian tendencies and corruption without making comparable strides in relieving the hardships faced by its citizens. The “New India” risks becoming an ersatz China.

For more on the global princeling epidemic, see The Hindu’s Hasan Suroor on Britain’s several budding political dynasties, and Isaac Stone Fish at Foreign Policy and Katherine Moon at the South China Morning Post on the several Asian countries which have elected or selected current leaders with political pedigrees. These include Japan, both Koreas, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Malaysia, Pakistan and Bangladesh.

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Economist Yasheng Huang compares China to India, and asks how China’s authoritarian rule contributed to its astonishing economic growth — leading to a big question: Is democracy actually holding India back? Huang’s answer may surprise you.

Read more comparisons between India and China via CDT. Read more by Yasheng Huang.

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Indian newspapers are filled with articles comparing the two countries. Indian executives refer to China as a template for development. Government officials cite Beijing, variously as a threat, partner or role model.

But if keeping up with the Wangs is India’s economic motive force, the rivalry seems to be largely one-sided.

“Indians are obsessed with China, but the Chinese are paying too little attention to India,” said Minxin Pei, an economist who was born in China and who writes a monthly column for The Indian Express, a national daily newspaper. (No Indian economists are known to have a regular column in mainland Chinese publications.) […]

Evidence of the Indo-Sino interest disparity can be seen in the two countries’ leading newspapers. The People’s Daily, the Chinese Communist Party’s house organ, had only 24 articles mentioning India on its English-language Web site in the first seven months of this year, according to the Factiva database. By contrast, The Times of India, the country’s largest circulation English-language newspaper, had 57 articles mentioning China — in July alone.

The security sphere is one in which Beijing does take a keen interest in India, however. This was brought to the fore by reports of a face-off between the two countries’ navies in the South China Sea in late July. From The Wall Street Journal:

The geopolitical chess game intensifies as Chinese and Indian navies show off their flags in the Indian and Pacific oceans with greater frequency. India, for one, is wary of leaving its trade and energy supply routes in the Pacific Ocean to the goodwill of China’s navy.

India’s total trade volume with East Asian economies now exceeds that with the European Union or the United States, while more than half of India’s trade now goes through the Malacca and Singapore Straits. This economic reality drives strategy. As part of its “Look East” strategy, India has concluded over a dozen defense cooperation agreements over the last decade with Southeast and East Asian countries.

In particular, the Indian Navy places energy security and sea-lane protection as priorities. In December 2006, then-Chief of Naval Staff Admiral Sureesh Mehta expanded the conceptual construct of India’s “greater strategic neighborhood” to include potential sources of oil and gas imports located across the globe—from Venezuela to the Sakhalin Islands ….

Beijing is plainly uncomfortable with the prospect of India’s rise. It has derided U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s calls to India, made most recently in Chennai this year, to play a greater role in East Asia. The Chinese took umbrage at the 2010 “Quadrennial Defense Review,” published by the Pentagon, which described India “as a net provider of security in the Indian Ocean and beyond.” Much to China’s chagrin, India’s naval activism has encouraged countries ranging from South Korea and Japan to Vietnam and Indonesia to “view India as a possible counterweight to future China in Southeast Asia.”

The article goes on to stress the importance of effective crisis prevention protocols between India and China to prevent inadvertent escalation of hostilities. The Sydney Morning Herald recently covered China’s reluctance to put such protocols in place with the US (via CDT).

The Diplomat also reported on the South China Sea incident, noting measures by the Indian army to prepare for possible future conflict:

The question for the Singh government is how to respond to an increasingly assertive China. This wouldn’t be the first time that tensions have flared in the past couple of years and comes as India has announced plans for the formation of a new strike corps aimed specifically at being able to hit targets inside China in the event of conflict breaking out.

The formation of the new strike corps has been under consideration for the last two years, but has only now been confirmed. According to Trefor Moss, writing here last week, it’s reported that it will focus on the eastern end of the contested border to bolster India’s defence of Arunachal Pradesh (what China calls Southern Tibet), as do the two new mountain divisions numbering 35,000 troops that the Indian Army has already raised. These are based in Nagaland and Assam, just south of the disputed province. However, the strike corps will consist of a further 40,000 troops, and its presence will significantly alter the Himalayan dynamic, with Indian forces in the region previously adopting a more defensive posture.

Sources:

India Measures Itself Against a China That Doesn’t Notice – NYTimes.com
The new middle classes rise up – The Economist
Asia’s Great Naval Rivalry – WSJ.com
India, China Navies Face-Off – Indian Decade – The Diplomat

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Post tags: Arunachal Pradesh, economic development, India border, India comparison, navy, security
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For all its elephantine weight, India has long shown mouselike diplomatic clout. Historically, its diplomacy was constrained by poverty at home, fraught relations with neighbours, notably Pakistan and China, and an anxiety to avoid taking sides in the cold war. Even today, its foreign service remains woefully understaffed: both New Zealand and Singapore have more serving diplomats. Now India is trying harder to get noticed ….

As it happens, India’s prime minister, Manmohan Singh, has just spent six days in Africa, along with hordes of Indian ministers and businessmen. An Afro-India summit, the second in three years, with leaders of 15 African countries, produced a surge of shared goodwill. Mr Singh had admirable deeds to point to. India is the third-biggest contributor of UN peacekeepers to the continent, helping clamp down on civil wars in Sudan and Congo. India’s navy chases Somali pirates. And, the prime minister reminded listeners, India’s record of speaking out against apartheid in South Africa was an honourable one.

More striking, Mr Singh promised $5 billion of loans on easy terms over the next three years for Africans willing to trade with India, plus another $1 billion to pay for education, railways and peacekeeping. It is a steep rise in aid and assistance—last year India gave a mere $25m to Africa—and marks a striking shift, especially since India itself is still a big recipient of aid. But Mr Singh wants something in return: African backing for another round of long-stalled efforts to reform the UN Security Council. India craves a permanent seat, and will back an African permanent one, too, probably for South Africa.

The Guardian suggests that India, for now, faces an uphill battle:

Bilateral India-Africa trade has grown from about £620m in 2001 to £28.5bn in 2010. India’s commerce and industry minister, Anand Sharma, hopes it will reach £43bn by 2012. Some 250 Indian companies have invested, mainly in telecommunications and chemical and mining companies.

But India remains about a decade behind its Asian rival. China says its two-way trade stands at £75bn, a 43.5% increase on the previous year, and up from just £620m in 1992. It has built roads, bridges, railways and power stations in return for access to markets and resources.

Brahma Chellaney, professor at the New Delhi-based Centre for Policy Research, told Reuters: “India is massively playing catch-up to China in Africa, and only in recent years is it trying to engage the continent in a serious way. But it is trying to build political and economic ties, and position itself as different to China, which has acquired the image of being a new imperial power.”

India is widely perceived as relatively benign, but the contrast is inevitably not black and white:

… like China before it, India has been criticised for turning a blind eye to human rights abuses and corruption. Its state-owned oil company has invested in Sudanese oil, and New Delhi avoided criticising the Khartoum government at the height of the Darfur crisis.

While there is considerable overlap between the two countries’ offerings, India takes pains to emphasise areas such as healthcare and information technology. From the Indian Express:

If it’s China’s construction prowess that gives it a foothold in Africa, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s six-day trip to the continent sought to differentiate India’s long-term strategic offering for Africa’s many small states — helping them gain expertise in a range of services from education to healthcare and information technology ….

“China helped build a 200-bed hospital in Dar-es-Salaam and India is helping train our doctors in specialised areas of open-heart surgery and renal diseases,” [Tanzanian President Jakaya] Kikwete said at a joint press conference with Singh today ….

Besides healthcare and agriculture, Singh said, India is ready to provide all the help it can to enable Tanzania create a pool of world-class IT professionals.

“If we can produce a steady stream of highly trained scientists, technologists and engineers, our cooperation would be worthwhile and we would be putting our money to good use,” he said inaugurating a Communication and Information Technology Centre of Excellence in the capital city.

The Los Angeles Times notes that, whatever the differences between the two rivals, real benefits from their involvement will depend ultimately on local factors:

Africa isn’t exactly complaining about the attention.

“Africa enjoys this very much,” said Alex Vines, head of the Africa program at London’s Chatham House, a think tank. “It can negotiate a better deal, particularly knowing that India and China are involved.”

In China’s favor, it got a head start and has significantly more money to work with. Africa’s trade with China was about three times its trade with India in 2010: $127 billion versus $40 billion. The gap is expected to widen by 2015.

India may have certain soft-power advantages, including its Bollywood film industry as well as widespread English fluency and a history of living under British colonial rule that it shares with many African countries. There is also a significant Indian diaspora in Africa ….

Just how much Africa can gain from its suitors remains to be seen, analysts said.

“In the end, it depends on good African governments to get good deals for its people,” said Vine of Chatham House. “That gets back to the major challenge for Africa: governance and corruption.”

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Some statistics about China and India, drawn mainly from the World Bank and the United Nations, are relevant here. Life expectancy at birth in China is 73.5 years; in India it is 64.4 years. The infant mortality rate is fifty per thousand in India, compared with just seventeen in China; the mortality rate for children under five is sixty-six per thousand for Indians and nineteen for the Chinese; and the maternal mortality rate is 230 per 100,000 live births in India and thirty-eight in China. The mean years of schooling in India were estimated to be 4.4 years, compared with 7.5 years in China. China’s adult literacy rate is 94 percent, compared with India’s 74 percent according to the preliminary tables of the 2011 census.

Sen then goes on to discuss less direct consequences of economic growth and argues that in some of those areas India may already be ahead of China:

When we consider the impact of economic growth on people’s lives, comparisons favor China over India. However, there are many fields in which a comparison between China and India is not related to economic growth in any obvious way. Most Indians are strongly appreciative of the democratic structure of the country, including its many political parties, systematic free elections, uncensored media, free speech, and the independent standing of the judiciary, among other characteristics of a lively democracy. Those Indians who are critical of serious flaws in these arrangements (and I am certainly one of them) can also take account of what India has already achieved in sustaining democracy, in contrast to many other countries, including China.

Not only is access to the Internet and world opinion uncensored and unrestricted in India, a multitude of media present widely different points of view, often very critical of the government in office. India has a larger circulation of newspapers each day than any other country in the world. And the newspapers reflect contrasting political perspectives. Economic growth has helped—and this has certainly been a substantial gain—to expand the availability of radios and televisions across the country, including in rural areas, which very often are shared among many users. There are at least 360 independent television stations (and many are being established right now, judging from the licenses already issued) and their broadcasts reflect a remarkable variety of points of view. More than two hundred of these TV stations concentrate substantially or mainly on news, many of them around the clock. There is a sharp contrast here with the monolithic system of newscasting permitted by the state in China, with little variation of political perspectives on different channels.

Freedom of expression has its own value as a potentially important instrument for democratic politics, but also as something that people enjoy and treasure. Even the poorest parts of the population want to participate in social and political life, and in India they can do so. There is a contrast as well in the use of trial and punishment, including capital punishment. China often executes more people in a week than India has executed since independence in 1947. If our focus is on a comprehensive comparison of the quality of life in India and China, we have to look well beyond the traditional social indicators, and many of these comparisons are not to China’s advantage.

Read more articles comparing India and China in various aspects via CDT.

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What can we learn, about either the People’s Republic of China or India and about what makes the two countries similar to and different from one another, by placing recent mega-events in these two young nation-states side by side? As a China specialist who watched the Beijing Olympics from afar with great interest in 2008, spent a month in Shanghai last summer while it played host to the 2010 World Expo, and is now nearing the end of his first stay in India, which took place in an autumn week that began right after the Commonwealth Games had concluded, I’ve been ruminating on this question a lot lately. Here are several things that strike me as worth considering, after a week in Delhi that has included participation in an academic workshop and public events devoted to themes of urban change.* In some cases, my comments bring up issues that have received a lot of attention in mainstream media coverage of the mega-events; in other instances, I push in directions that the press has not tended to go. In all cases, I am drawing upon not just my own reflections, but also on private and public conversations I have had during my brief time in Delhi, especially discussion at a stimulating October 19 Delhi Urban Platform event, which was held at the Center for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS) and gave me the opportunity to share a stage with Ravi Sundarum (an urban theorist and media studies scholars who is one of the initiators of the inspiring SARAI network) and former CSDS director Ashis Nandy (the globally famous and provocative political thinker).

Read more about the Beijing Olympics, the Shanghai Expo, and comparisons between India and China, via CDT.

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China has unexpectedly emerged on the world stage, its intentions and motivations still largely unknown, its distance from Western-style democracy still considerable, and its nationalism frequently verging on xenophobia. Failed experiments with unfettered capitalism have helped instal right-wing authoritarian and populist left-wing regimes in Russia and Latin America respectively. The recent irruptions of radical Islam, the calamitous war in Iraq and the Taliban’s resurgence have muddied further the image of a world rushing to embrace victorious Western values.

Nevertheless, the triumphalist assumptions of the end of the cold war continue to inform not only the average issue of the Wall Street Journal or The Economist but indeed most of the foreign coverage in the American and British media. A worldview decisively shaped by events of the previous two decades—the Reagan and Thatcher revolutions that renewed a belief in the ‘magic of the marketplace’—is still far from being overhauled by the recent shocks to the Western economies. Most Western writers and journalists are still conditioned to see their consumer societies as the inevitable and desirable terminus of history.

Free-market capitalists in much of the West happily managed without representative democracy for centuries, and still circumvent its checks and balances. Indeed, notwithstanding the moral rhetoric of freedom and democracy, multinational companies prefer China to India because they find it easier to work in a politically monolithic country than in a pluralistic one. Still, China’s failure to blossom into a liberal democracy while embracing free-market capitalism provokes some discomfort among liberal-minded journalists.

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To be fair, it’s hard to capture the enormously complicated and consequential story of the simultaneous rise of China and India in an icon. Visual clichés and journalistic shorthand exist for a reason, and Foreign Policy has admittedly relied on its fair share of stereotypes, from China’s Yao Ming to turbaned Indians bathing in the Ganges. Yet Western headline writers and art directors really should try to do better — it’s getting pretty tiresome out there.

Let’s start with zoology. America is the eagle, and Russia the bear, but China and India each have not one, but two emblematic animal icons that have nearly opposite connotations. China is alternately a cuddly panda or a threatening dragon, depending on the author’s message. (Interestingly, in Chinese folklore a dragon is a wise and positive force, not a menace to be slain by St. George.) India is either an elephant or a tiger — a wise, slow-moving giant or a surging predator. A March 19, 2007 Businessweek cover story, headlined “The Trouble with India: Crumbling roads, jammed airports, and power blackouts could hobble growth,” showed an elephant shattering like a clay doll. A Feb. 3, 2007 Economist cover, “India Overheats,” depicted a tiger with its tail on fire.

If the dragon and the tiger fight, the panda and the elephant seek refuge from the world — as in yet another Economist cover, which shows those two animals taking shelter from a storm beside a limp little tree and beneath the headline, “China and India: A Tale of Two Vulnerable Economies.” (Occasionally the panda does get mean, as when the Economist depicted one ascending the Empire State building, a la King Kong, on a cover captioned: “America’s fear of China.”) If there’s any larger meaning to be gleaned from this set of magazine covers, the West, it seems, is worried that India might fall apart — and that China might get its act together.

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The prospect of renewed war between India and China is, for now, something that disturbs the sleep only of virulent nationalists in the Chinese press and retired colonels in Indian think-tanks. Optimists prefer to hail the $60 billion in trade the two are expected to do with each other this year (230 times the total in 1990). But the 20th century taught the world that blatantly foreseeable conflicts of interest can become increasingly foreseeable wars with unforeseeably dreadful consequences. Relying on prosperity and more democracy in China to sort things out thus seems unwise. Two things need to be done.

First, the slow progress towards a border settlement needs to resume. The main onus here is on China. It has the territory it really wants and has maintained its claim to Arunachal Pradesh only as a bargaining chip. It has, after all, solved intractable boundary quarrels with Russia, Mongolia, Myanmar and Vietnam. Surely it cannot be so difficult to treat with India?

That points to a second, deeper need, one that it took Europe two world wars to come close to solving: emerging Asia’s lack of serious institutions to bolster such deals. A regional forum run by the Association of South-East Asian Nations is rendered toothless by China’s aversion to multilateral diplomacy. Like any bully, it prefers to pick off its antagonists one by one. It would be better if China and India—and Japan—could start building regional forums to channel their inevitable rivalries into collaboration and healthy competition.

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When Sunil Mittal, the 52-year-old chairman of Bharti Enterprises, recently announced the Indian mobile company’s successful acquisition of Kuwait-based Zain’s African operations, he flagged off the next stage in the so-called “race for Africa” between India and China.

This leg will be much more than a modern-day great game played for political influence and access to natural resources. And in this contest the tortoise may be set to sprint past the hare.

“The Indians are in there for the long haul, integrating economically, socially and politically,” said Harry Broadman, the author of “Africa’s Silk Road: China and India’s New Economic Frontier.” “I think India is the sleeper. These are the businesses that are operating under the radar and will have a much more durable impact on the African economy, arguably, than the Chinese.”

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Has China’s more turbulent British colonial history and India’s more ‘civilising’ one given the former the edge over the latter in the 21st century?

On December 31, 1600, a group of London businessmen banded together to create a quaintly named company, Governor and Company of Merchants of London Trading into the East Indies. A royal charter gave it all privileges of trading in that part of Asia. Little did these gentlemen realise that their British East India Company (known better under this popular shorthand) would unleash a dynamic whose reverberations would ripple across the world 300 years later. The Company became the common womb from which two stepchildren, British India and colonial China, sprang to become non-identical Asian twins.

There were few buyers for British broadcloth and other European goods in Asia, but large buyers in Europe for tea, silk and porcelain from the East. In China, the Company ran into another problem; Chinese traders were unwilling to sell unless they were paid in silver. British merchants had to move with devil’s speed to plug this one-sided drain of gold and silver. They devised an

elaborately devious plot to trade opium at auctions in Calcutta, mix it with tobacco, smuggle it across the seas into China, and finally use these illicit earnings to pay for Chinese exotica.

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Where does the heart of the relationship between the dragon and the elephant lie?

Is it in their increasingly public bickering over disputed land on the Himalayan border, where Indian officials have accused China of 270 line-of-control violations and 2,285 instances of aggressive border patrol last year?

Or is it in a burgeoning economic relationship that has seen China become India’s largest trading partner, with bilateral trade leaping from $15 billion to $40 billion in the past five years — and is expected to grow to as much as $60 billion in 2010?

Does it rest in China’s aggressive support of India’s arch-rival, Pakistan; Beijing’s strategy of building roads and ports in countries around the Indian Ocean as a “string of pearls” designed to choke India; and its efforts to block a $2.9 billion Asian Development Bank loan to India?

Or is it anchored in the remarkably united front India and China presented in Copenhagen, where they stood together to ensure that developed countries did not extract unilateral concessions on climate change from developing ones?

Right now, the answer seems to be both.

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China today said its economy in first three months of 2009 grew by 6.1 per cent, its lowest rate in over a decade, thus raising apprehensions about the communist nation losing its status as the world’s fastest growing economy to India.

While the official figures for growth in India’s gross domestic product during the first three months of 2009 is not available as yet, the country’s economy is estimated to have grown by 7.1 per cent in the fiscal ended 31 March.

Given a steeper decline than India in China’s GDP growth rate, which stood at 13 per cent in 2007 and fell to nine per cent in 2008, some experts opined that it would be interesting to watch which of the two economies grow faster going ahead.

Asked if China’s GDP growth rate could fall below that of India’s, Standard & Poor’s chief economist for Asia Pacific, Mr Subir Gokarn said over telephone that it was “quite likely in one particular quarter”, but on a yearly basis it might not be the case at least this year.

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