WHAT is the point in comparing China and India? Today, China has a GDP that is over four times larger than that of India and is well on its way to becoming a superpower with the most advanced digital technology at its command. The principal reasons for its rapid growth are also well known. They relate to an ambitious leadership commanding a party-state dictatorship with an enormous organizational capacity to mobilize the population and economic resources for competitive advantage. This form of government is, of course, a modern development, but it is also the historical legacy of one of the world’s longest tradition of a centralized state which impressed its image and aura on the populace far more deeply than any other pre-modern state.

For a long time, the Chinese leadership has focused on the recovery of China’s greatness, often at great cost to its human and natural environment. If we adopt such a perspective there is not much to learn from the Chinese experience for Indians for whom pluralism has arguably been – although beset by recent challenges – its most significant historical legacy.

Let us set aside the narrative of comparison based on competition and grievance. In my view, this global narrative of political and economic competition has been a principal cause of the degradation of the planet and its sustainability. The comparison between these societies can educate us a great deal more by focusing on the common forces that converged on post-colonial societies. The problems and dilemmas that each of the two societies faced were remarkably parallel, and while their methods and approaches to the common problems were quite different, I am struck by how they were repeatedly impacted by similar global processes and forces over the last 150 years or so. How have these populous and ancient societies responded to these convergent forces; what are the similarities and differences with respect to the experiences of the people, communities and the idea and ideals of the nation? What are the different costs and benefits that these responses have entailed?

 

The approach I adopt may be called convergent comparison. This approach moves us away from ‘methodological nationalism’, which privileges national territoriality – the institutional processes, including the type of regime, of the nation state – as the sole carrier and container of change within the nation. Methodological nationalism may well be the legacy of an older position that views histories as principally those of the sovereign nation. The alternative view by no means denies the role of national institutions and regimes as a major frame of reference; rather, it urges us to appreciate that particular developments within nations are conditioned as much by less visible circulatory global forces and subnational currents as by purely national or internal processes.

Convergent comparison arises from a deeper view of history (including and perhaps especially contemporary history) as circulatory. Fundamental historical processes are not tunnelled, channelled or directed by national, civilizational or even societal boundaries, but are circulatory and global, much like oceanic currents. Processes emerging in one form in place A flow to many places, B, C, etc., where they interact with other local and trans-local forces to re-emerge often in place A, though often recognized as something else.

Consider for example, Marxism in China. Marxist ideas entered China through various points of contact with French, Japanese and, of course, the Soviet Bolsheviks. In China this ideology of the proletariat was converted into a peasant revolution, theorized and sanctioned by Mao Zedong as Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought (MLMT). Subsequently, in the post-WWII period, MLMT circulated in the developing world as a peasant revolutionary doctrine. However, in recent decades it has re-emerged as the revolutionary path of tribal communities whether in Latin America, India, Nepal and elsewhere.¹ One can say that circulatory forces, which demand local responses, form the zone of convergence; the various sub-national and national responses, in turn, form the basis of convergent comparison.

 

Convergent comparison implies that a cause or a conditioned response may not always be immediately visible to contemporaries operating in the thick of events. While theories of the comparative method eschew connections between the terms of comparison – for the reason that a pure comparison is not possible with terms influencing each other – this is a superficial and static view of how historical processes work. Comparative histories can illuminate deeper connections at the level of generative causal mechanisms or a conjunction of multiple causal mechanisms that are not necessarily expressed at the surface level. Examining various local, national, and regional patterns allows us to assess the degree to which they converge or diverge in response to the same causal mechanisms revealing the interactive dynamics of a society.

Circulatory history is not only formed during critical junctures such as the end of World War II or the end of the Cold War; it is continuous. The varieties of adaptation and innovation recommended by dominant development paradigms, ranging from recipes for economic growth to cultural norms, emanate and circulate from different points in the system or region. Moreover, certain root ideas – such as citizenship – that were planted in the constitutions of many decolonizing nations came to fruition in these societies only decades later, and often by means of a bandwagon or domino effect, as was the case, for instance, in the overthrow of Cold War authoritarian regimes by rights-based movements from Korea to Indonesia.

 

Notwithstanding the differences between China and India, post-colonial nations in Asia shared not only a common historical base-line of radical transformation, but also long-term connections before and during the colonial period which also shaped their conditioned responses. Moreover, some of these connections are remarkably resurgent today. Since the 1960s, the main blinding impediment in the exploration of China-India relations was the China-India war of 1962, which cast all other connections between the two countries into the shadows of obscurity. As a result, India-China studies of the modern period have been largely confined either to the study of ancient civilizational exchanges or to contemporary realpolitik competition.² Happily, a new generation of researchers is now breaking out of these ruts to explore a wide range of connections and influences, direct and mediated, between the two societies.

 

The Tang historian Tansen Sen has extended his study to the contemporary period, looking not merely at Buddhist exchanges but a host of economic, political, cultural ties, cooperative and competitive – which took place under the Muslim and British rulers of India – that extended deep into the 20th century.³ Others include Matthew Mosca, whose book⁴ on Qing conceptions and responses to British India in the 19th century influenced the historian-writer Amitav Ghosh, who in turn has studied the impact of opium production and trade for the China market upon India’s economy, society, and culture.⁵ Brian Tsui has generated a wealth of information in his study of Guomindang ties with Indian nationalists in the pre-independence period,⁶ and Arunabh Ghosh takes us up to the 1950s when there were extensive connections and exchanges between China and India in unexplored fields such as science, demography, industrial technology, culture and much else.⁷ These works not only reveal myriad connections beyond the binary of civilizational exchanges and realpolitik rivalry, but also show how the two societies responded to similar challenges of the time.

The histories of China and India had long been intertwined through circulatory forces – such as inter-Asian overland and maritime trade, Buddhism, Islam, the introduction of New World silver into Asia, and not least the opium-for-tea trade, but it was in the mid-19th century that we begin to see convergent developments in the two societies. The disruptions caused by an aggressive capitalist imperialism spearheaded by the British led in both cases to climactic uprisings such as the 1857 Rebellion in colonial India and the Taiping Rebellion (1850-64) and other uprisings in late Qing China. In quelling these rebellions which evidenced a mélange of familiar and foreign patterns, states in both societies were obliged to undertake institutional reforms (new schools, courts, police, public health regimens, and so on) that in turn led to the gradual expansion of modernizing groups and practices – concentrated in China’s treaty ports and India’s larger cities.

 

The ascendancy of indigenous modernizing groups in the newly formed ‘public sphere’ in the late 19th century, achieved through modern educational institutions, law, and the press, as well as modern business practices, was evident in the urban sectors of both countries by the early years of the 20th century. Attendant parallels in the political sphere were quite remarkable. In India the reformist moderates who urged the ‘British to be more British in India’ were matched by the early generation of reformists in China whose movement culminated in the 100 Hundred Days Reform, conducted under the auspices of an enlightened young emperor who was expected to transition into a constitutional monarch on the model of Meiji Japan. The weakness of these moderate reformists produced a more radical generation of nationalists – the 1911 revolutionaries in China and the ‘extremists’ in India – around the same time in the first two decades of the 20th century.

Mass movements of political mobilization also began in both societies at the same time – shortly after the end of World War I and the Russian Revolution (a period of great global ferment), and continued unabated until mid-century. To be sure, there were significant differences – not least in the leadership’s attitude towards violence – between Mao’s Communist Party and Gandhi’s Congress Party. But the general framework of a mass movement – its goals, rhetoric, visual or representational techniques and results – allows for far richer comparability than has been assumed or attempted to date. Although these movements were certainly cognizant of one another, the question of formal exchanges or conscious imitation of practices is more difficult to ascertain. Nonetheless these parallel movements are highly suggestive of the homogenizing effects of global developments during this period.

 

The Republic of India and the People’s Republic of China were, as noted, founded on different political principles. But after riding a crest of mass movements, leaders in both societies faced comparable imperatives of nation – and state – building. China, following the Soviet Union, explicitly constructed its command economy upon anti-capitalist foundations, while the onset of the Cold War gave other new nations such as India the ideas and space for autarkic development with strong socialist characteristics. Although capitalist economics may have encouraged the advent of a competitive market society, the alternative progressive vision of history that promised endless growth and welfare meant that even socialist societies premised upon the rejection of capitalism would have to engage in competition (for resources and technology), both internally and externally. Growth entailed expansionism that was not only territorial and economic, but political and psychological as well.

For the People’s Republic of China (PRC), the anti-imperialist movement was intended to produce revolutionary socialist societies among the decolonizing nations. For India, the goal was to realize the Nehru-Gandhian ideals of peace, non-alignment, and constitutionalism. From an outcome-blind 1950s perspective, India’s subsequent development of a nuclear programme was almost as unexpected as China’s turn to market capitalism. Both had initially believed that their recent political achievements as well as their older historical greatness entitled them to lead the new nations of the world along alternative paths. But both had also entered what had previously been the club of (imperialist) nation states into the greatly expanded system of nation states under the aegis of the United Nations.

Modern nations were founded on the theoretical notion of development of citizens and cooperation, but practically on the grounds of competition in a capitalist world economy. Circulatory historical forces at this time reflected both tendencies over the post-war period.

 

We pursue these convergent themes into the contemporary period in a recently published volume. The book, Beyond Regimes: China and India Compared includes comparative chapters on the efforts and costs of state- and nation-building; the impact on agricultural society and industrial labour; the varying fortunes of movements for rights; and the comparable social effects of globalization and neo-liberalism in China and India. The volume seeks to break away from the narrative mould in which these two societies have been viewed and viewed themselves.

 

Since at least the early 19th century, when G.W. Hegel expounded his Lectures on the History of Philosophy, these two non-Abrahamic civilizations have been paired by their insufficiencies in order to make the West whole. Thus, China was all state and had no society (read rights) whereas India had only society (read caste). This narrative has had several variations over the last two centuries and is expressed in recent times as a contest between the elephant and the dragon. The narrative which became rapidly folded into the frame of capitalist competition between nations is still more evident as the Indians seek to transmute the elephant into a sleeker predator such as the tiger or the lion.

Our concern is to create an alternative framework of reference, which does not have to be magnetized by this narrative. There are many developments, effects, costs, socio-cultural modes in society that are shared and comparable. We need to highlight this dimension in order to forge cooperation in addressing common and global problems such as the environmental crisis, which can only be addressed collaboratively.

 

Footnotes:

1. Prasenjit Duara, ‘The Chinese Revolution and Insurgent Maoism in India: A Spatial Analysis’, Economic and Political Weekly 46(18), 30 April-6 May 2011, pp. 33-37.

2. Prasenjit Duara, ‘Shaping Transnational Asian Studies New Directions in China-India Research’, (guest editor’s introduction), China Report 46(4), 2010, pp. 327-32.

3. Tansen Sen, India, China, and the World: A Connected History. Rowman and Little-field, Lanham, MD, 2017.

4. Matthew W. Mosca, From Frontier Policy to Foreign Policy: The Question of India and the Transformation of Geopolitics in Qing China. Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA, 2013.

5. Amitav Ghosh, Sea of Poppies: A Novel (The Ibis Trilogy); 2011, River of Smoke, 2016; Flood of Fire. John Murray, London, 2009.

6. Brian Kai Hin Tsui, ‘China’s Forgotten Revolution: Radical Conservatism in Action, 1927-1949’, Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, New York, 2013. https://academic-commons.columbia.edu/.../ac.../Tsui_ columbia_0054D_11085.pdf.

7. Arunabh Ghosh, ‘Before 1962: The Case for 1950s China-India History’, The Journal of Asian Studies 76(3), August 2017, pp. 697-727. doi:10.1017/S0021911817000456.

 

References

Elizabeth J. Perry, ‘From Mass Campaigns to Managed Campaigns: "Constructing a New Socialist Countryside"’, in Sebastian Heilmann and Elizabeth J. Perry (eds.), Mao’s Invisible Hand: The Political Foundations of Adaptive Governance in China. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 2011, pp. 30-61.

Prasenjit Duara and Elizabeth J. Perry (eds.), Beyond Regimes: China and India Compared. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 2018.

Prasenjit Duara and Elizabeth J. Perry, ‘Nationalism and Development in Asia’, in D. Nayyar (ed.), Asian Transformations: An Inquiry into the Development of Nations. Volume II. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2019.