September 18, 2014
Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Chinese President Xi Jinping and his wife Peng Liyuan.
The visit of Chinese President Xi Jinping is an important event. Unlike other countries, which want to cooperate with us because they have business interests here, China wants to cooperate and compete with us at the same time. China and India are civilisations, and this fact lends complexity to diplomacy and trade.
Personally, Xi’s visit brings back memories of an earlier event. Then Chinese President Jiang Zemin visited India in 1996, and I was the Indian minister-in-attendance. Jiang was a technocrat. Like most high-level leaders of the socialist world, he was well informed about societal developments. He asked me what I thought of Francis Fukuyama. I told him Fukuyama had got it all wrong. How could history come to an end just when it was China and India’s turn to take centrestage? At his farewell press conference, Jiang mentioned that he had discussed cultural matters and chaos theory with me.
China and India must learn to compete and cooperate
Simply put, foreign policy is an attempt to extend the national pursuit of certain objectives to the global plane. The Chinese, like others, are very focused on this. In August 1982, I was asked to be deputy leader of the first large official delegation to China since the early-Sixties. P.N. Haksar had written a non-paper with a senior Chinese colleague after a series of meetings in hill stations in India and China. It argued that trade and contact between Indian and Chinese people should resume. This first delegation comprised social scientists, led by G. Parthasarathy, who, apart from being a formidable diplomat, was the first vice chancellor of Jawaharlal Nehru University and was the chairman of the Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR) at the time. Back then, I was on deputation to Delhi, but my parent institution, the Sardar Patel Institute of Economic and Social Research at Thaltej, had just become a national ICSSR institute on the centenary of Sardar Patel’s birth.
When we reached Beijing, we were told that the great Deng Xiaoping would meet us for 10 minutes. This was a great honour and the meeting in the famous Great Hall of the People was quite an event. Deng began with “we are now opening, but you already know them”, referring to Western countries. “Our experience is that the richer they are, the meaner they are, so we want to cooperate with you.” He then told us about the developmental trajectory he expected China to trace. And that is indeed the way China developed. That country has travelled a lot since then. My point is that China and India are not just nation states, they are civilisations, and we have to learn to compete and cooperate in spite of our conflicts.
While on a visit to western China, I observed that red chillies, which came from Gondal, were in great demand in local supermarkets. In fact, I later learnt that sometimes the Chinese buy the entire crop. In western China, even though religion is not favoured by the socialist government, there was a Buddhist revival. So, there is a high demand for vegetarian food. But vegetarian Chinese food of the Sichuan variety requires a great deal of chilli. I told my hosts that with the Sardar Sarovar project, we could meet any agricultural demand. The scope for cooperation between economies growing at more than 6 per cent per year (it is to be hoped India does so) is limitless.
We need to understand the explosion of small-scale industry in China. It is competitive, not because of subsidies but because of the country’s solid infrastructure. A Chinese business that competes with small-scale firms in India pays a pittance for regular and assured power supply. China’s highways, used to carry its exports to markets, are first rate, too. In fact, what we need to learn from China is not the art of running a small firm well, but the art of supporting a small business.
At the beginning of this century, I was asked to project “India 2020” for the United Nations, taking sustainability concerns on board. A colleague in China was to do the same. The Goldman Sachs numbers only came later. Since our income levels would reach a quarter of those in the US by 2020, the spread of energy-consuming technology like air conditioners was inevitable. But we also pointed out that the world would end if we did not worry about sustainability. China was already burning two billion tonnes of coal, our projected demand for 2020, at the beginning of this century. But this cannot go on. Not because there isn’t enough coal but because our lungs won’t be able to take it. China and India should show the world what they can do together.
The writer is chancellor, Central University of Gujarat
express@expressindia.com
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