China knocking. Open the door. Smile and say hello to the guest. As you read this, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao will have come, absorbed and gone. He won’t have addressed Parliament and he most certainly won’t have certified us as an emerged power. And don’t even mention the word permanent UN Security Council seat to him. His wife, Zhang Peili, wouldn’t have been seen or heard, much less break into a happy dance at a children’s school.
But we still need to let the guest in and serve him golden Darjeeling tea, which he will no doubt claim is from his slopes. We have to ignore that statement and pretend we haven’t heard, for now.
In the new Forbes list, the world’s most powerful person is Chinese, not American. But it’s not for that reason alone that we need to humour Wen. China is the world’s second largest economy with rapid growth that’s stunned detractors. China with a cold could give the world a runny nose. Its forex reserves, the world largest at nearly $3 trillion, outstrip India’s economy. China may be a long way away from matching the size of the US economy, but its heft in the new geo-political and economic order is nearly equal. It has frustrated every American administration in the last decade that has pressed for a real appreciation of the yuan. It’s the single largest holder of US treasury bills and has America where it wants. So, there are lessons to be learnt from China on how to get there. A place, we are just not in.
China’s growth has its roots in two things missing in India — infrastructure and states that work in tandem with the centre for economic gain. Its economic expansion is driven by political logic.
India needs to befriend China to help botox its creaking and tardy infrastructure — it needs to sit at the table and seek help to build out its ports, roads and utilities, so that they are not talked of as bottlenecks to doing business here. After all, China mercilessly took the best from the west in its early years and made sure it got what it wanted, on the terms it wanted. In short, it cashed in on the western greed of finding a market for its engineering, goods and systems, something that India must now be for China with its growing appetite to take business outwards.
India also needs to learn how China successfully cut red tape, even if it was only in the special economic zones, so that investors could come in and get on with business-with-ease in various provinces. China has built big industrial towns with skyscapes that outrival Chicago’s. Along the way, millions have been pulled out of poverty, though vast disparities exist. India’s big-ticket projects are Posco’d — high profile investments stuck because of lack of planning and thought, and divisiveness between the Centre and state. India needs to show the world that doing business is not a disjointed process because the states and the centre do not speak in unison. Its advantage of having a democratic process needs to come through, not end up as a curse.
Wen, who has none of the charisma of Obama, in his speeches, has alluded to China and India being friends and not competitors. Neither of the statement is entirely true — China has on several occasions thwarted India and dictated terms to it, including that it shouldn’t attend the Nobel Peace prize ceremony in Oslo. By attending the meeting, India has stood up for its own, and that’s a good sign.
Truth is, it’s money that makes the world go around. To beat China at its own game, India needs to do to China, what China did to the West. When it then becomes a true economic juggernaut, it can claim Oolong tea as its own. And Wen may have to pretend he hasn’t heard.
(Anjana Menon is executive editor, NDTV Profit. Views expressed here are personal)
