How come China today is so different from India today? In terms of cleanliness and poverty elimination specifically.
I know China liberalized in the 80’s and India in the 90’s. So you could say that’s a 10 year difference.
But China 10 years ago was still very different from India even today.
Does anyone have any ideas?
But of course it's got major downsides, as the Chinese government is also pushing hard to remove distinct cultural identities from the various regions of China. India is still much richer in terms of cultures than that, the government can't just come in and start erasing that.
And Vietnam isn't that much better than India (I travel to both 3-4 times a year because of family).
If you're in D1 or D3 of HCMC maybe, but that's not where the majority of Saigon residents live - they mostly live in D10, D8, or D4 which don't look much different from similar neighborhoods in most of Urban India.
And once you go to rural Vietnam, I've noticed the quality of life is worse than those in the villages my extended family lives in back in India, because most spending is basically given to a handful of cities.
My wife's ancestral village in VN has dirt roads, a single primary school, and no doctor, and social services such as direct welfare transfers are nonexistent. On the other hand, my ancestral village in North India has a wind turbine factory, an electric battery factory, and farmers and residents get around $50-150/mo in direct benefits transfer.
A "China" or "South Korea" model doesn't make sense for a democracy like India (or even Indonesia or Phillipines, which share similar issues). A "Turkiye" or "Israel" model makes more sense for these kinds of countries.
Was authoritarianism
>VNM/PRC/SIN
Is authoritarian
The TLDR is competent dictatorship and normalization (really cooperation) with hegemon (US) made rapid export led growth work. The dictator sets up the industries, the hegemon consumes the outputs. Need both, transition away from authoritarian is optional though (especially resource exporters that hegemon needs).
Democracies to my knowledge has been incapable of bootstrapping the 0-1 agrarian -> industrial development fast. I can't really think of one that didn't industrialize from exploitation/colonial phase prior to democratizing.
India hindered by being "real" democracy with universal sufferage at the outset while being very multicultural. It's... very helpful for development to culturally genocide society into relative monoculture. You want that migrant country girl from Z village to be fungible cog in factory Y, and you start that by making sure everyone can interact with language Z.
It has nothing to do with totalitarianism. Anyone who has actually lived in India or China for more than a month, as I have, knows that cleanliness and poverty are cultural factors as well. People casually throw garbage around and don’t seem to care, it’s cultural. I saw countless scenes in different Indian cities where people sat around garbage and filth (not homeless individuals), seemingly unbothered by it.
There’s also a culture of cheating on exams, which diminishes the value of education certifications. Attitudes in customer service can be striking too, like when I was at a pharmacy, and the clerk was engaged in a private phone conversation while a whole line of customers waited for him to finish. Or drivers who arrive hours late and then get annoyed if you find another ride etc
People who believe that India will catch up to China soon are living on a different planet.
https://www.thechinastory.org/yearbooks/yearbook-2013/introd...
https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna19197078
http://www.china.org.cn/english/Life/159407.htm
Cheating and queuing woes, you say?
https://time.com/4360968/china-gaokao-examination-university...
https://alanrefkin.com/2013/08/13/queuing-in-china/
https://theculturetrip.com/asia/china/articles/why-do-chines...
I am reminded of this excerpt from Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism:
> In his 1903 book, Evolution of the Japanese, the American missionary Sidney Gulick observed that many Japanese “give an impression…of being lazy and utterly indifferent to the passage of time.” Gulick was no casual observer. He lived in Japan for 25 years (1888-1913), fully mastered the Japanese language, and taught in Japanese university. After his return to the US, he was known for his campaign for racial equality on behalf of Asian Americans. Nevertheless, he saw ample confirmation of the cultural stereotype of the Japanese as an “easy-going” and “emotional” people who possessed qualities like “lightness of heart, freedom from all anxiety for the future, living chiefly for the present.” (...) > This was not just a western prejudice against eastern peoples. The British used to say similar things about the Germans. Before their economic take-off in the mid-19th century, the Germans were typically described by the British as “a dull and heavy people.” “Indolence” was a word that was frequently associated with the Germanic nature."
With regards to China, the article I posted gives a concise history of the modernization of the Chinese economy. Essentially, they
a) chose to model their economy after South Korea and Japan as an export-economy.
b) normalized political relations with the US and the West and developed intensive trade.
c) invested heavily in manufacturing & technical skills that were lost.
Industrial accidents happen in the US too, although I don't know what rate vs China. I think the fact that their factories have surveillance at all shows they are taking action to improve safety. You've got to consider, the population is 1.4bn, so there is going to be more freak accidents caught on camera.
they are extremely good at suppressing such videos internally
they will sometimes allow something like the particular video you mention (I was living in China when that video went viral, this was about 10 years ago) because it directs anger at individuals' bad behavior, not at the government (in fact, in favors the government making and enforcing rules to disallow bad citizen behavior)
All such questions are easily answered once you take a look at the per-capita budget each country has for the required expenditures.
What they don't always do well is make the choice to change when conditions change. There's also usually a limited bandwidth for deciding and forcing change, so you tend to end up without economic diversity and without great results in areas outside of policy.
A democratic/distributed decision making process tends towards slower changes and less alignment, but more diversity.
If you decide to be the world's production line, economic diversity may be less important. But having diversity is usually a good thing when economic tides change.
However, central planning as proven to be bad once you reach a developed state. Lots of reasons for this which would be too long to get into here, but has a lot to do with people willing to follow a sacrifice when there is a crisis or the country is working together to get itself out of a bad situation.
So, it could be that central planning is good for some use cases and bad for others. Likewise, with liberalised economies.
There may even be some overlap between the two.
India never really liberalized. It was more like one trick pony with affluence and progress centered around IT industry.
You can drive 30 kms from Bangalore in any direction and apart from mobile phones and two wheelers, nothing much has changed since 50+ years.
Urban Goverment in China versus India is VERY different.
In China, cities are given significant autonomy and a bigger pot of cash compared to prefecture they are in. Furthermore, the Chinese cities that most foreigners visit (Beijing, Shanghai) are under direct control of the Central Government.
In India, urban government is subservient to state government - with zoning, planning, and budgets coming from the state bureaucracy, especially in cities that HNers tend to visit in India (Bangalore, Gurgaon, Hyderabad). Let's use Bangalore as an example. Bangalore is India's tech hub and the economic engine for Karnataka, but urban Bangalore only has around 20 seats in Karnataka's Legislative Assembly out of 224 total. This means that state governments have little to no incentive to care about providing urban services and goods, when they can better invest in other constituencies that actually can flip the tide in elections.
The other aspect is that slums residents can swing elections, so any attempt to demolish a slum can destroy the incumbent party's shot at local elections. Slums/encroached land have significantly monetary value - the first generation who lived in a slum and built the residence often tend to move out and rent out the original building to a new resident while also having the option to mortgage the building to a local lender. If you are an unskilled migrant laborer, you are making around $100-150/mo in Urban India, but if you have a slum residence, if litigation happens for redevelopment, you might end up with around $10-20k and a free apartment (which you can rent out). The same thing happened in China all the time until the mid-2010s, and it's just the general cycle of urbanization.
That said, Indian cities are getting better and cleaner, but funding for urban infrastructure only really began in the last 2-3 years. Indian cities today aren't that much different than their Chinese peers in the 2000s, and the exact same kinds of problems (toxic smog in Delhi like in Beijing in the 2000s) but also development are happening (the Delhi redevelopment for G20 similar to Beijing's redevelopment for the 2008 Olympics).
Also, one thing I noticed is the 2nd most populous of each state tends to be much cleaner than the 1st. So Mysore is miles cleaner than Bangalore, Coimbatore compared to Chennai, Panchkula to Gurgaon, and Pune to Mumbai, which I assume is because there are fewer outsiders, so the electoral impact is higher, as most migrants (both from the same state or outside) continue to use their home town/village as their primary constituency in order to continue to maintain rural/town landholdings.
That is because citizens themselves don't care.
Single biggest motivation of the Indian voter base is using the process of elections and then elected politician like attack dogs to hurt the people they hate(Often minorities). This is through and through. This manifests along the lines of religion and caste, mostly. But regionalism and language politics has played its part in the past. But in the past few decades its mostly religion.
Every time a political party does something good, anything good. Especially uniformly for the masses, they are voted out. This is because in a country like India, people don't want things to uniformly improve for everyone. The goal is always for your(community) to have an edge, while everybody else must be made to suffer. Any other arrangement and the masses feel their favorite politicians didn't hurt the people they hate enough.
>>That said, Indian cities are getting better and cleaner, but funding for urban infrastructure only really began in the last 2-3 years.
Quite the opposite, every city in Karnataka, has gotten significantly dirtier, garbage littered and both dusty and polluted in the past decades.
>>Also, one thing I noticed is the 2nd most populous of each state tends to be much cleaner than the 1st. So Mysore is miles cleaner than Bangalore
Thats mostly because fewer the people, lesser hands there are to throw garbage and pollute, its just that scale of grotesque is reduced not the phenomenon itself.
This isn't about citizens. Fundamentally, residents in a mega-city like Bangalore simply do not matter in a parliamentary democracy like Karnataka. Bangalore doesn't make you CM, so there's no incentive for Karnataka's politicians to invest in it.
> Every time a political party
Urban management is not about political party - it's about bureaucracy. INC, BJP, JDS, etc can win elections, but local government such as public works are apolitical. The issue is states in India do NOT devolve planning commissions to local government - just about every function that a city would have (Zoning, Permitting, Land Acquisition) are managed by state level planning commissions. India is unique in the level of centralization that state level governments have.
> Quite the opposite, every city in Karnataka
Karnataka is not the rest of India. Bangalore is notoriously bad at urban planning and management. The fact that much poorer Indore can outcompete Bangalore in cleanliness and urban management is a testament to the fact that it's about local government.
Also, ime, Delhi NCR (not just Delhi and Noida but also ancillary towns like Kurkushetra and Karnal), Mumbai, Pune, Hyderabad, Chennai, and Coimbatore have all steadily gotten much better over the past 10 years. Bangalore on the other hand has remained underdeveloped due to land mafias.
> Thats mostly because fewer the people, lesser hands there are to throw garbage and pollute, its just that scale of grotesque is reduced not the phenomenon itself.
These are multi-million person cities with populations similar to Bangalore barely 10-15 years ago, yet they are still cleaner and better managed than Bangalore circa 2010.
While population does play a role, Karnataka is unique in that the JDS admin in the 1990s removed almost all urban governance responsibilities from Bangalore and moved it to either the State Commission (eg. zoning) or privatized (eg. garbage collection - but this was because of the World Bank).
Do you seriously stay in Bangalore man? Because you don't sound real. Nearly every major politician has real estate and small industries stake in Bangalore. Politicians are NOT the problem, people are. People are not interested in good things. Their sole life is spent hoping other people have a worse life than theirs.
>>Urban management is not about political party - it's about bureaucracy
Most garbage picking vechicles, big tippers et al belong to local MLA's. Again do you even stay in Bangalore?
>>Bangalore is notoriously bad at urban planning and management.
My family has been in Bangalore for like a century. It was the best city ever. But you can't exactly have "urban planning" if migrants start growing 20% yoy for 30 years straight.
>>Bangalore on the other hand has remained underdeveloped due to land mafias.
Again do you stay here? Ever applied for a KIADB or BDA plot, waited for decades? Literally IT industry exists because of private land owner investments.
The odd one out in this assessment is India, because it did some similar things (land reform) without success. A difference might be that India sheltered businesses from foreign competition and didn't encourage and invest as much. Another, is that you need caste connections to do business. Culturally I intuit that the upper-castes that controlled government were less interested in rapid nationwide progress, unlike the ideologues that led South Korea and China. They lived comfortable lives and hung their hats on that.
And the caste aspect doesn't make sense, as caste is hyperlocal and there isn't solidarity between caste groups of different ethnicities. Furthermore, caste ranking doesn't fully translate to business ownership, as traditionally, merchant and moneylending castes like Banias were towards the lower end.
The main difference between China and India is China makes it's urban centers de facto independent of rural hinterlands within the same prefecture, while in India, urban and rural are both under the same state government.
A prime example is the state of government schools in India, which are almost exclusively used by the very poor. State funded schools in east Asian countries are of significantly higher quality.
And India uses Caste Based Affirmative Action using a quota that makes around 60% of all government positions reserved for lower caste individuals [1]
> state of government schools in India, which are almost exclusively used by the very poor. State funded schools in east Asian countries are of significantly higher quality
These are broad terms. Education falls onto state and local government in India, and leads to massive variation (eg. Kerala, Punjab public schools doing fairly well versus Bihar, MP public schools doing badly).
It's the same in East Asia, though I would like to know what you define as "East Asia". The urban-rural education gap is well documented in China as well [2]
[0] - https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/how-caste-factor-p...
[1] - https://www.clearias.com/reservation-in-india/
[2] - https://fsi.stanford.edu/docs/research_projects__understandi...
Now, but the argument concerns development over the 20th century, not the current makeup.
China and India only began to diverge in the late 2000s to early 2010s, and much of that is due to China's investment in urban construction and real estate, while India's economy entered a lost decade due to a loan origination crisis.
There was total chaos through 1980s and 1990s, governments would come and go without outright majority without much progress on the economic front. Only exception was being at the right time and place for the outsourcing boom. But its effects were limited to a few cities and groups of people.
There was some correction in 2000s, but it does look like making a affluent industrial economy is neither the goal of the political class or the electoral section.
Hyperlocal corruption/nobility is the worst kind of corruption/nobility.
Non-local ones will at least create systems that work, supporting infrastructure, and will try to maintain some amount of material wealth that they can prey upon.
I don't see the significance of this.
China also didn't succeed due to "liberalization". How come the absolute majority of capitalist economies in the world (Latin/South America, Africa, Asia etc.) are still dirt poor then?
It's currently an "utter failure"? I only know how to read Wikipedia, and that tells me it's the 5th largest economy in the world and currently growing faster than China. Of course it's still very poor per-capita but "utter failure" paints a very different picture.
Just allowing the existence of private enterprise doesn't mean much when institutions are weak or corrupt. If you know everyone isn't playing by the rules, the most you can accomplish is rent-seeking while everyone tries to make each other suckers.
If all you have is a strong ML-style government and no liberalization, however, then there's not much of a point in finding opportunities to invest because everything you have is at the mercy of the Party.
China succeeded because investors gambled correctly that liberalization would be accompanied by credible governance, and it can all go away if and when the credibility for investors and entrepreneurs is replaced by Xi's neo-Maoism.
You mean US' various anti China sanctions and trade restrictions
In the post World War II era, Singapore was also deeply impoverished and wrecked by the legacy of war and colonialism. Hong Kong as well. Taiwan was poor too. Japan was decimated by the war.
All these countries ended up becoming wealthy and prosperous due to liberalization and capitalism. South Korea, Taiwan, China, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan. These places are all wealthy today.
Of course liberalization and capitalism was not the only factor. I don’t know much about the Latin American economies but I will take your word for them in terms of being poor. And India has many issues too.
That’s what I’ve been thinking about recently. It’s interesting to see what people say.
Also thank you for the book recommendation.
In % GDP terms S.Korea is a top spender on research, development and education.
To give you a contrast in the recent Delhi elections, the party that built quality schooling for the poor was voted out. These are deep undercurrents of the Indian society. Watching a poor persons child get schooling and eventually a shot at getting better than your kid, is something most of the Indian middle class can't bear to watch it happen.
The motivations of Indian electorate are always- Can this political party hurt the people I hate?
You can't help people whose life purpose is to sabotage good things out of envy that other people will have it good.
The party that got voted out was mired in corruption scams and their premise to power was fighting against corruption.
Politics in India can be a lot more nuanced than you claim it to be. What you are saying is one part of the equation.
Thats basically every single political party. And thats actually baked into core assumptions before even going to vote. Regardless of who you put in power will steal.
The edge comes from using you as a attack dog to aim against people they hate. Not honesty.
The other advantage China has was continuity of government economic policies because you had pretty much the same people in charge for a couple of decades which gave time for the policies to take root.
Of course China is a totalitarian police state, and not a place I'd want to be (I did live there for some years). But people put up with that because of the hyper economic growth in the 80s-00s; it's hard to think about freedoms and human rights if you can't even feed your family. Once people reach a state where they have their basic needs met then they begin to value other things (like individual freedoms).