One thing that often frustrates me, is when I
listen to global experts and folks I meet, who give sermons on China its
progress, scale, development & then talk of how we India are so far behind.
This is what I call as Fact but not true.
Have we as a nation failed to harness our abilities, talent, opportunity etc? Absolutely YES. We could have done far better & yes, we can justifiably blame the socialist age, license raj regime, our politicians, our industrialists.
But why is it that none understand one simple fact that is also true - China is a one party, one policy, one govt autocracy/ communist/ socialist/ capitalist system with no election ever - & once a policy is made, it is implemented, if need be, by "gunning" people down. They make 50-year plans while others plan for the next elections. Today they are criminalising the business decisions of anyone who has invested in China, if they chose to develop a second supply base outside China – and the world accepts that meekly.
We are a noisy democracy & somebody somewhere in India will always be affected by any decision & they will protest, oppose & legally/democratically prevent the decision from being implemented. The slightest effort to quell that & global/ local powers come hounding India on human rights, freedom, climate change, environment etc. We transitioned to accepting capitalism only in 1991. China started in 1978 with AGRICULTURE & then moved to Industry. In 2026 we are still terrified to touch Agriculture, however inefficient it is while the small farmer is reduced to penury by middlemen/ brokers. Just see how Agricultural contribution has evolved in China/India.
China will overtake USA, Europe economically if
not already done, again because these are a democracy, govts and policies
change, HR and freedom are important. Unpopular opinion is that the head
honchos of business in the west have experienced China over decades & are
trying to implement the same kind of mind control over people in their own
liberal societies with different strategies. India with its strong connect to
the west, is also affected bringing one more layer of complexity in our already
complex national economic fabric.
While nobody takes away the credit of the hard work, intelligence, etc of the Chinese people, it’s unfair to critique the rest of the world including India, by comparing them to the Chinese system. Let’s step back and imagine – if the same kind of political continuity with no protests/ freedom to oppose anything was followed in global democracies - would be accept that, be happy and yet give the same sermons? Honestly, I DON’T have an answer to that except to say that I enjoy the freedom we have, even if it hurts us and frustrates me like many others. Those crying hoarse about this, I humbly feel are hypocrites of the highest order.
Bullet trains in China in ONE city in 2015 and In India we are still debating this in 2026.
We need to observe the Chinese Americans. We see big names like Jensen, Lisa, Eric, Tony, Katherine, Elaine, Gary, Judy, Michelle across USA Govt and industry and unless someone choses to emphasise their second name, they go by these names making them sound American and Christian. They celebrate Thanksgiving and blend with American society. There is a Chinatown in every town – more for Americans and foreigners than for Chinese. Its all about marketing.
Compare Indian Americans – Vivek, Vedant, Kash, Jay, Raja, Pramila, Satya, Sundar, Arvind and they stand out as Indians with an exception in Bobby who converted to Christianity. Indians stand out as Indians, display their Indian roots proudly since their marketing efforts is for the Indian market. A Little India in any American town is by and for Indians. I pass no judgement on either except to say that Chinese marketing is far more effective to capture the local society from within.
I share a few anecdotes from my personal experience in China and leave it to readers to form their own opinions.
25 years back I was in China to learn about manufacturing systems for implementation in India and could take pictures as needed. A lady was doing a certain activity which we needed to replicate. Standing next to her, took many pictures, with no success to capture the equipment she was using since she didn’t pause for a breath. In India 200% guaranteed, a worker would have paused for a few seconds to help me. Importantly, NOT ONE worker even shifted their eyes away from their activity when I stood peering down to learn the activity.
Visiting a customer, they arranged for a guide to give me a short tour of the town and the lady and me got talking. As we had coffee late in the evening in an area that was the replica of Time Square, New York with fancy buildings, lights, I asked if she was late to get home. She said she lived close by. Surprised I just said Wow! She explained. The entire area was squalor, tin homes of 300 sq ft where she had lived. One day the Govt said – development – and the entire “town” was simply picked up, taken far away and dumped to live. The area developed and became glitzy, futuristic, global brands and business paid premium money to get space and within that glitz, the govt built modern flats for each one of the towns folks who had been thrown out and her family given a 600 ft home. Everybody got double the size – free of cost. In India we would retain the squalor and filth for equality in “development”.
A Chinese friend and me were talking when I
ranted about some policy related to the Govt of India and he was clearly bored.
He asked why was I wasting my time on something the Govt of India did or didn’t
do when I was not involved nor have information. As we argued I asked him his
attitude to life in his country. He said – I have a job, family, home, car, a
good school for my kids, can travel across the world, access to good
healthcare, shopping, entertainment, and why the eF should I be bothered about
what is the foreign/economic policy of China when its none of my business. What
do I get by having an opinion about it? Who cares? We do our job, the Govt does
its and what’s this stuff about freedom to have opinions on subjects where we are
not involved or have information? Was he right?
I was accompanying the American educated Arab MD of a Middle East company to China for a meeting related to purchase of buses for his country. The Chinese OEM senior management team greeted and entertained us over 2 days of discussions – all speaking in English. There was one Chinese chap who stuck to the MD like a shadow, didn’t contribute anything except to chit chat with the Arab MD occasionally. Intrigued I enquired with one of the others from the ME company. He said the chap could speak Arabic and his role was to make the MD feel at “home” by having conversations in Arabic occasionally. I am still unable to wrap my head around this kind of marketing effort. An Indian customer MD would have learnt a few words of Chinese to impress his host.
In the same transaction, the customer from ME wanted a bus from China but with our product fitted on it since the option he had from China was 2 generations old and inefficient. It was a vendor supplied item for the Chinese bus OEM, and the bus being sold in the middle east. The bus OEM refused and insisted on using Chinese vendor made components only. The Chinese bus sales manager dragged the issue for over 3 months demanding the use of a China vendor component as if his life depended on it. The customer bulldozed them and finally they “agreed”, asking us to deliver the item. The Chinese system then stonewalled us for 6 months and we didn’t know where to begin let alone how to navigate it. We finally did succeed but the experience was profound. An entire country unified to ensure that a China made product only be used. Can we imagine any Indian OEM company fighting to use one component made in India when it didn’t matter to their product? They would have agreed in 30 seconds and invoiced the bus in 30 minutes.
Attending a business meeting in USA, my Chinese counterpart was with me, who I was meeting for the first time. Everybody seemed to know him and greeted him effusively – apparently, he was in prison for the last one year. We had multiple manufacturing locations in China contract manufacturing parts for a global European brand in large numbers. The European company sent a highly expensive tool to us and by mistake it was delivered to our plant B, a few kilometres away from plant A to which it was destined. Frantic about the missing tool, the team late in the evening realised this and arranged to shift it from Plant B to A. The still packed tool was loaded, transfer documents between the two plants made and with no authorised signatory around, my counterpart was asked to sign the documents – a most routine activity. As the truck moved late in the night, tax authorities stopped it, checked the documents with the driver, took out the documents in the box and cross checked to find that the value of the tool mentioned in the transfer document was a fraction of the real value of the tool. Swiftly they arrested my colleague and jailed him. The news spread like wildfire across the team and every single Director level officer of the company from across the plants, ran for their life to cross over to Hong Kong before midnight. The company fought the case for a year, sought help from even the American govt before they could get my colleague released. During this year the senior management could not even step into China and worked from HK. This, when there was absolutely no intent or evidence of fraud.
There are many more experiences but will end by sharing what the CEO of a Chinese company told me as we spoke about India. “In China we have communism but no communists, In India you don’t have communism but have communists”.
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