Why we learn wrong lessons from China

There are many things China can teach us. Some good, others bad. Sadly, for the present we seem to be learning only bad lessons. The good in the Chinese system is obvious — how to eliminate poverty on a mass scale, build a world-class manufacturing system, develop a huge science & technology base and so on.

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The bad, too, is apparent — the denial of basic human rights to a large chunk of its population, restrictions on the freedom of speech and political paternalism of a single party that denies agency to the citizenry, and seeks to enforce political and cultural uniformity.

In many ‘bad’ areas, the Chinese are world-class. Their surveillance companies such as Hikvision and Dahua dominate the global market and within the country over 250 million CCTV cameras operate, along with facial recognition software and big-data analytics. The Chinese Internet is first-rate, but it is a closed affair; all posts are monitored on a near real-time basis. Access to VPNs (virtual private network) is largely barred. And there are other means of social monitoring such as national identity cards and household registration system for all.

India is getting there in some of these areas. Television surveillance is in its infancy but rapidly growing. However, phone tapping has been around for a while. The government refusal to provide any information on Pegasus tells its own story. Last year, the use of VPNs was effectively banned. As for identity cards, we have our own Aadhaar. More recently, the government has taken a step towards regulating social media by assuming the role of fact-checker. A lot of this is seemingly driven by technology and allegedly aimed at shoring up national security. But there are few signs that the restrictions come with genuine restraints against their misuse.

As in the case of China, ‘national security’ has entered into our discourse in a big way. Recently, the Supreme Court scolded the government for using national security as a pretext to deny citizens their rights. In China, according to the Financial Times, “Sixteen aspects of the central government’s work are now officially classified as matters of national security, including politics, economics, cyberspace, ecology and others.” India also seems to be moving in China’s direction in shaping its media to be uncritical and ‘nationalistic’. One interesting feature of this is an increasing assertion the West is determined to prevent China/India from rising.

Just how this is playing out is evident from the recent incident involving Congress leader Rahul Gandhi’s UK speech in criticising the state of Indian democracy and its caste and communal problems. Just why Rahul saying these things on foreign soil was ‘anti-national’ is not very clear; surely an Indian’s rights and freedoms are not limited to Indian soil alone.

There is some hubris here — the belief that India is on the verge of becoming a superpower and, hence, the global conspiracy. To counter charges of the democratic decline in the country, a fantastic counter-narrative is being generated that India is actually the mother of democracy since ancient times. The Chinese, too, laud democracy, but insist that their ‘socialist democracy’ led by the Communist Party is its most effective form.

How does this square with the other reality — that western countries are ardently wooing India because they see it as the only viable counterweight to China in the Indo-Pacific? It doesn’t. Actually, the mild western reaction to a number of recent events like the raids on the BBC, the instances of communal violence in the country, the use of state agencies against Opposition leaders and the Indian neutrality on the Ukraine conflict suggests that New Delhi is actually getting a free pass because of its geopolitical importance to the West. And you can be sure that the high-ups in our government are aware of this.

There are, of course, better things we could be learning from China. The first being the importance of domestic social stability. The Chinese accept all past empires, be they Han or led by foreigners like the Mongols or Manchus, as being part of their history and are now trying to Sinicise all their minorities in the name of social stability. There is an Indian echo here in the ‘Hindi, Hindu, Hindustan’ slogan, but, for now, the reality is of unchecked hate speech and divisiveness.

One positive lesson we need to learn is about the single-minded Chinese pursuit of aatmanirbharta. Their ruthless one-party system has facilitated this, but where India has faltered is not on the goal, which has been common to all governments, but in its implementation.

The results are somewhat pathetic. In recent days, we have been treated to grand political celebrations of the Vande Bharat trains. For Indians, the train looks like a futuristic marvel, with top speed of 110-130 kmph. The reality is that we are far behind Japan, Europe and China in this area.

Till the 1990s, the Indian Railways was superior to its Chinese counterpart. In 2004, they issued a tender for 200 train sets and divided them between major world companies, demanding technology transfer as part of the deal. They invested significant money in absorbing that technology without bothering too much about IPR issues. Today, they are world leaders with a 42,000-km high-speed network where trains travel above 250 kmph on dedicated tracks.

This technique of importing technology through purchase, investment and often outright theft, and then systematically ‘re-innovating’ is what has made China an industrial giant. Theirs has been a single-minded approach we could emulate. Unfortunately, all lessons we seem to be learning are the negative ones.