Doing business in China

For students of international relations, China and India’s inability to get along in at least the first half of 21st century has been something of a puzzle. It is not about just being neighbours with a broken fence, though there is that too. There is no doubt that the two countries’ economic heft is asymmetrical, India being far smaller than China. But it has not helped that China has been as touchy about India on several counts, possibly more than India has been about its northern neighbour. 

Commentators have often tried to analyse this puzzle through political and strategic prisms. Saibal Dasgupta has moved to explore this most fascinating sliver of global engagement on economic terms instead. Running with the Dragon is a story that eschews politics and gets to a bare bones engagement with the less famous cases of India and Chinese business collaborations. He tells it well and this is the chief strength of the book. “For those who think Chinese digital media is replete with local cultural nuances and a foreigner venturing in it would be lost in the forest of confusion here is a story…two young [Indian] men with no family background in business who borrowed $40,000 from friends and relatives has grown over fifty times in net worth today”. 

Mr Dasgupta explains that Ravi Shankar Bose and Ranjit Singh came to Shanghai as employees of Contests2Win, an Indian joint venture with SoftBank and Siemens Mobile in 2000. “The two founded Fugu Mobile, a name they chose as an inspiration from the fugu puffer fish, a highly poisonous delicacy in Japan which required trained chefs to serve it. …A Japanese connotation to their own company would no doubt add a sense of semantic credibility in a way that was similar to Sony, an American sounding Japanese company…[and] to address the staffing challenge, Bose and Singh when to NIIT…with a bit of effort aided by a stroke of luck, Fugu managed to bag Mercedes AMG as their first client….” They are now looking at opportunities to expand to other countries from China. It is a remarkable story for the business press in India that reaches reflexively towards the few wellknown stories of Dr Reddy’s or Sun Pharma and Tata Motors whenever China is mentioned.

The Fugu Mobile story is among the seven case studies Mr Dasgupta has set out to illustrate the variety of India and China’s business engagement. Each of them, besides the vignettes that Mr Dasgupta draws from his notebooks, make a persuasive case for a larger business engagement between the two nations. His thesis is that it is possible for businesspeople from both nations to engage each other and they have been doing so, despite the obvious differences in culture, especially food. The late Indian dinner at past eight in the evening has apparently often caused misery for visiting Chinese business people. “This is a unique relationship that defies negative vibes from official machinery and the media. It is likely to grow with the expansion of cross-country tourism. Politicians and the media will have little opportunities but to respond positively to this unique friendship, and thus make business interactions more rewarding”.  

He is also scathing about the weak support Indian diplomats provide to the Indian business people, in contrast with what China offers. “They must ask themselves if they have done enough to lobby in China and build on the massive cultural influence that India has had on the Chinese people for generations”. This is rather true as one also found out in recent engagements with Beijing-based institutions.

Despite the deep dive into the nature of the business connections and references to shared history, the rough edges of the relationships are still visible. The cases are often evocative but they do not address why belligerence clouds resolving of mutual issues like IPR and non-trade barriers. The author himself suggests some of those in his summary of the Belt and Road Initiative. Although he appears to suggest a halfway house is possible in India’s engagement with China in this project of projects, doing so would be difficult. As the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) negotiations also show, China will be most keen to highlight India’s support but is unlikely to make any move to lessen India’s concerns about the building up of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor over disputed territory in Jammu and Kashmir. We are not even referring to the flashpoints in the Indian Ocean and of South China Sea. 

The possibilities of cooperation as the author says are immense, but the differences between the two nations instead of remaining a historical legacy have acquired recent reasons for confrontation. It is evident in RCEP, it was also evident in Doklam. Often, this is the reason economic engagement is also postured on military terms between the two, despite both China and India making deeper inroads into each other’s business. 

Running with the Dragon: How India should do business with China  

Author: Saibal Dasgupta

Publisher:Portfolio Penguin

Price: Rs 599

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