Learning Mandarin in Hong Kong in 1971 soon after he joined the Indian Foreign Service opened “a whole new and fascinating world” for Shyam Saran. “I was coming face to face with a civilization with a long and varied history, a philosophical and cultural heritage of enormous richness, and a view of the world quite distinct and indeed different from others,” he writes in the introduction to his new book, How China Sees India and the World. Saran spent six years in China in two stints and witnessed its “rapid and far-reaching transformation”. China is today the world’s second largest economy after the U.S., and is already a leader in new-age technologies like artificial intelligence, quantum computing and space exploration. He explains why despite India and China being roughly at the same economic level once, India is now a “retreating image in China’s rear-view mirror.” An excerpt:
India and China were roughly at the same economic level in 1978, with similar GDP and per capita income. Though China began to grow much faster thereafter, the gap between the two countries was not very significant even a decade later, when the Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi paid a historic visit to Beijing in December 1988. It was then possible for Deng Xiaoping to declare that there could not be an Asian Century without India and China growing together and playing a resurgent role. The surge in India’s GDP growth as a result of its own economic reforms and liberalisation policies adopted in the early 1990s expanded India’s political and economic profile. At the turn of the century, India was behind China but was seen as shrinking the gap. In the period 2003–2007, India’s growth rate accelerated while China’s began to slow down. This was the brief period when India’s diplomatic options multiplied. It was able to leverage the advance of its relations with one major power to promote its relations with other major powers, thereby expanding its strategic space.
