Of China and India: wandering thoughts from streets, boats and trains (2018) | Hacker News Reader

Of China and India: wandering thoughts from streets, boats and trains (2018)

yawningbread.wordpress.com

33 pointsClewza31330 comments

I used to be an Indian and I spent many years in China. Its almost impossible to not compare the two. Both have massive populations and quite frankly have a lot in common in terms of culture (lavish weddings, fillial piety, obsessive competition, etc). Both countries are also extremely diverse in terms of cuisine and languages (although CCP has done a lot in the way of erasing dialects). Both countries also have problems with corruption in the government. And yes, I've seen bus drivers go on strike in China (People everywhere are the same, push them too far and shit will hit the wall. Incidentally, I have no idea where the said bus drivers are now... probably deemed too dangerous). In my opinion the difference in infrastructure is also partly because (1) China is much more resource rich and less population dense. Look at the tibetan plateaus and the deserts, nobody lives in these places. On the otherhand in India everywhere you go there are people.(2) A failure of infrastructure is far more dangerous for the CCP than the Indian government. Don't believe me? Find out what the people of wuhan have to say to the mayor of wuhan. (3) Corruption in China has found a way of symbiotically working together for the benefit of many.

Currently, China does not have protests because their infrastructure just works. Wages have significantly improved. For the vast majority of people, they have gone from not having food to now having children who ar university graduates. Also thanks to the trade war and racism faced by Chinese overseas, it is even easier for the CCP to sell nationalism and a unified identity to the Chinese. If however, their infrastructure fails, I'm pretty sure there would be 1.1 billion angry people and unlike the Indian government which is used to protests, the Chinese government would collapse under its own weight.

> China is much more resource rich and less population dense.

China is by far denser as a big chunk of its territory are deserts, and unlivable mountains. In fact, the plain, and grand valleys have higher population density than Bangladesh.

India on other hand only have Thar, and Western Ghats which are both more crowded than my hometown.

Yes, the cities are denser, however not having people living in large chunks of land mean that the land is easier to exploit for natural resources.

In 2010, a Tsinghua University study estimated that China had 180,000 protests per year. However, virtually all of these were small, local issues (insufficient compensation for land expropriation etc) and they did not meaningfully threaten the hegemony of the CCP.

It's just CPC can shove them under the carpet exceptionally well.

I myself saw quite an intense action in the very centre of Guangzhou, and by tomorrow the only trace of it was some muddy cellphone video on a Chinese emigre website.

The border war is basically petty. Its people clubbing each other to death with lumps of wood and iron because neither side wants to go back to firing guns over the mountain passes.

The trade war is not the same as the US trade war in any way. Its real. Nepal and Bhutan are on notice: if they take service from China beyond a level India can accept in a field like telecommunications, the oil and electricity pipeline will turn off.

India has a huge market. And, has raw foods and goods China wants. China has engineering India needs. They both want to trade but they're fighting for supremacy with a border. The trade war with the US is a different set of risks, China holds the debt and US consumers pay the tariff often. India and China, there is a real border. They don't want this getting to lobbing bombs.

Visiting each other is sensible. Both economies have pretty baroque trade laws, investment risks. Learning more about each other's culture and style is sensible.

I don't disagree with most of what you say, but it's worth noting that Bhutan exports electricity to India, not the other way around.

They're still told very firmly not to form trade links with China without India's permission. If its not electricity there is some other dependency which is used as a holdover. Construction materials i would guess.

That border controls the sources of major rivers for both countries. Water is a critical resource.

Water is one aspect, and the other (in Kashmir) is land for their Belt-And-Road project.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_00Xx9b87A

I think a technocratic single-party system (however terrible for liberty) would have never worked in India. The wounds of a colonial past followed by region-specific societal differences would be just to vast to overcome with an "enlightened" bureaucracy trying to force homogeneity down people's throats.

I suspect China had similar problems but the cultural revolution appears to have largely effaced the echoes of the past through horrible means.

India can still learn a lot from Chinese-style governance - it seems effective at dealing with local issues efficiently, especially in urban areas. India's urban regions suffer are chronically starved of funds and infrastructure because of lack of executive powers for local representatives.

> The wounds of a colonial past

China in 1949 was pretty much destroyed from both previous Japanese aggression and subsequent civil war. These wounds were substantial.

But I agree with the gist of your comment. India is too diverse to support a one-party, one-nation utopia.

One giant bad event vs generational damage. Quite a lot of difference.

Not to mention the century of humiliation, which by its name alone reveals a lot.

> I think a technocratic single-party system (however terrible for liberty) would have never worked in India.

True. Not for the reason of colonialism. In china majority(98% plus) believe they are descendants of the Han dynasty. This unified view of belonging is what allows the single party system.

Total opposite is with India. The Hinduism religious vedic books dictates to segregate the society in the name of varna system(its successor modern day caste system) and even goes as far to restrict the education to only the priestly caste. This is the reason India is far behind in terms of education before the british era. Only after the conquest of British slowly everyone had access to education. This is the reason almost 95 percent of people are first college goers in India.

> Hinduism religious vedic books dictates to segregate the society in the name of varna system(its successor modern day caste system) and even goes as far to restrict the education to only the priestly caste

Which vedic books? Can you provide a source? I have skimmed some vedic books, but never came across such restrictions.

> Only after the conquest of British slowly everyone had access to education.

To the contrary, some historians blame the British for worsening the caste system. See https://www.britishempire.co.uk/article/castesystem.htm for example.

> Which vedic books?

Rigveda and later codified through Manu smriti which codified this Varna and Jati system and made a class of untouchables [1].

This is one of the reason father of Indian constitution gave up Hinduism and became Buddhist. Current Indian govt actively promotes jati and Varna and perpetrate communal divisions to stay in power and people justify those divisions.

[1] https://legaldesire.com/dr-b-r-ambedkar-views-on-abolition-o...

Both Manu and Ambedkar were extremely unreliable relays of anything Vedic. They both had their own agenda for propping up some castes at the expense of another. Consider that the Rig Veda is written in a language that hardly anyone understands, there is no reason to believe Ambedkar could have faithful translated even one sentence of Rig Veda. Currently, the most authoritative source on RV is Jamison & Brereton's translation. I don't have access to it at the moment, but as I recall, there are just passing references to the varnas, shudras, etc.

There is a large body of evidence and research available for systemic exploitation based on Jati and varna's and the legitimacy of it claimed through vedas and manusmriti. May be go through wikipedia and other research sites can find an evidence of this system coming from vedic age and than subsequently developed into more repressive schemes. [1] [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varna_(Hinduism)

[2] https://sci-hub.se/10.1080/00472338085390141

Again, Manusmriti is not a vedic source. Mentioning it will only serve as a distraction and weaken your argument. The paper by Dipankar Gupta is junk. It does not cite the specific verse numbers of specific vedas. Apparently, Gupta has a lot to say, but gives the impression that he is simply making up stuff as he goes along.

The Wikipedia article is better. But you will notice the article citing the book I mentioned earlier: 'Stephanie Jamison and Joel Brereton state, "there is no evidence in the Rigveda for an elaborate, much-subdivided and overarching caste system", and "the varna system seems to be embryonic in the Rigveda and, both then and later, a social ideal rather than a social reality"'.

If there is really a "large body of evidence", I am still waiting for something concrete that you would cite, so that I can go look it up, in the Vedas.

Much of what you say about "Caste" is either Church propaganda or Caste politics.

Large parts of India was under islamic occupation for 300-700 years followed by 100-300 years of Christian occupation. Both were quite destructive, destroying universities, burning down libraries and destroying/looting temples.

Hindus pray to trees, animals and consider everything divine. The misinterpretation of the Varna is a devious christian evangelical agenda.

This flies against the face of numerous example of leaders of the Hindu society and authors who are not part of the clergy. The whole caste system which originates in Europe was transplanted to India to divide and rule.

> China now has the world’s most extensive bullet-train network, and most routes can be covered in a few hours. The trains reach a cruising speed of about 300 kilometres per hour

The situation in India is truly deplorable. Stones pelted [1] at trains going that fast will be devastating to passengers. And the passengers [2] are not all that great either. Now for my usual refrain: we have to fix the law and order situation before we talk about all this fancy stuff. Generally, as a culture, I see too little regard to private and public property. Public buses are burnt, trains are blocked, buildings vandalized, and so on, even though whatever was destroyed has nothing to do with the issue behind the protest. Nearly all political parties encourage such behaviour too. Anyway, the government's level of regard for their citizens' lives is something India and China have in common.

[1] https://www.indiatvnews.com/news/india-train-18-targeted-aga...

[2] https://www.asianage.com/metros/mumbai/250517/vandals-rule-t...

The people are already changing their behaviour, it is also upto the government to build for the people.

The political parties, especially the dynastically ones have been so far away from the people that it would take them a long time to understand that protests and violence are only driving people away from them.

Unfortunately a lot of these protests and violence is promoted and sponsored by agents outside the country.

The author is doing some powerful judging-of-books-by-covers without stepping back to look at the big picture. India's GDP is 15 years behind China's. On the scale of the countries, that is not much. India will catch up.

Also, China's powerful government isn't the thing making China wealthy, it is the seeds of growth that were laid back in the 1980s and 90s reforms. Like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shenzhen . Can't spend the wealth until somebody makes it.

The author specifically compares Sichuan (GDP per capita $6000, poor for China) and Kerala (GDP per capita $3000, well-off for India), and notes that the difference in development/infrastructure is far greater than the economic disparity.

That is probably the wrong way to look at it. It seems reasonable to expect a thresholding effect where up to some point basic needs get met, then over that point people can invest in improvements.

Doubling incomes should have a greater-than-doubling effect on investment and infrastructure. It isn't clear that the difference is greater than would be expected by the economic disparity.

The reform made China a partly Capitalism country, so if the reform is the key to China’s growth, India will be much wealthier than China as India has always been a pure Capitalism country. At least the strong government is a part of the thing making China wealthy.

India’s growth has fallen from 8-9 % to 4-6 % in recent years which is similar to China today. China grew at 10 % + for a long time. India even by GDP metrics is 25-30 years behind China.

I always wonder how china didn't succumb to crippling levels of infrastructure corruption affecting India. There's corruption but wasn't large enough to stunt GDP growth.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com