1. I like Anglospheric inheritance of political freedom. I like the joie de vivre. I like the disunity and messiness of free speech and country full of people who like to argue about books and politics.
2. Stronger basis institutions more widely dispersed, federalism, subsidiarity, maybe more resilient in the face of systemic shocks.
3. Industrial development has barely even happened yet. There is a high end and a middle class derived from it. The poor people may yet get rich. Lots of scope for the bottom to come up.
The foregoign is all impressionistic.
Who the Hell knows.
I am glad my kids are in the USA, despite many dangers and defects.
China: richer, cleaner, less crime, less corruption, better governance, way less crazy Muslims, less Maoists, less Cold War hangupgs, less crowded (soon), fewer slums.
From the article: "A recent Google search for “Dragon and Elephant” yielded nearly 5 million hits, compared with just 531,000 for “Eagle and Bear,” a once dominant pair."
Ummm...what a ridiculous piece of 'evidence' to support a point.
And to answer the question: Chinese. The 21st Century will be the Chinese Century, India is forever doomed to playing second fiddle.
"...less Maoists..." Funny point. The only Marxists left are on Western University faculty lounges,not Russia; the only Maoists are in India, not China.
After seeing the industrial wasteland of TEDA [1], one is more sympathetic to the few Marxists in China than to their Indian or academic comrades abroad......
From the author, a Chinese-speaking Indian journalist based in Beijing:
The best option, she contends, is to be a high-caste Indian man. His political freedom would certainly outweigh the economic opportunities of any Chinese citizen, she argues. But if that weren’t possible, she’d choose to be a wealthy Chinese woman, because she wouldn’t be as constrained as her Indian counterparts by low literacy rates and limits on female participation in the public sphere. If she had to be poor, she’d go with China. An Indian latrine cleaner may get to vote, she says, but a Chinese one is far less likely to be viewed as completely subhuman.
Ask me after I've actually been to India. I've spent enough time in China (still only a few weeks) to at least have a general sense of what it might be like to really live there, but my knowledge of life in India is honestly second-hand at best.
Of course, the question really isn't about what it's like there today-it's about a bet over what the two countries will be like in 20-30 years. I don't think many people in 1980 expected China to come out like it did in the 2000s.
Chinese. I can foresee far more political, ethnic and religious chaos in India in the next 30 years than China.
Civil rights would seem to me to be far more necessary for survival, let alone success, in India than in China. Pogroms are alive and well in India on a monthly basis and will continue to be so for decades to come, regardless of the laws, especially considering the thuggish backgrounds of so many Indian politicians and police.
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Comments to this entry
Lexington Green`
January 8, 2009
4:50 am
1. I like Anglospheric inheritance of political freedom. I like the joie de vivre. I like the disunity and messiness of free speech and country full of people who like to argue about books and politics.
2. Stronger basis institutions more widely dispersed, federalism, subsidiarity, maybe more resilient in the face of systemic shocks.
3. Industrial development has barely even happened yet. There is a high end and a middle class derived from it. The poor people may yet get rich. Lots of scope for the bottom to come up.
The foregoign is all impressionistic.
Who the Hell knows.
I am glad my kids are in the USA, despite many dangers and defects.
tdaxp
January 8, 2009
2:20 pm
Lack of civil rights would suck.
Carl
January 8, 2009
3:29 pm
Ummm...what a ridiculous piece of 'evidence' to support a point.
And to answer the question: Chinese. The 21st Century will be the Chinese Century, India is forever doomed to playing second fiddle.
Lexington Green`
January 8, 2009
4:09 pm
tdaxp
January 8, 2009
5:31 pm
Very pithy indeed!
After seeing the industrial wasteland of TEDA [1], one is more sympathetic to the few Marxists in China than to their Indian or academic comrades abroad......
[1] http://en.investteda.org/
TGGP
January 9, 2009
4:16 am
http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp/2008/04/why_burma_will_beat_bangaldesh.php
Curzon
January 9, 2009
7:32 am
The best option, she contends, is to be a high-caste Indian man. His political freedom would certainly outweigh the economic opportunities of any Chinese citizen, she argues. But if that weren’t possible, she’d choose to be a wealthy Chinese woman, because she wouldn’t be as constrained as her Indian counterparts by low literacy rates and limits on female participation in the public sphere. If she had to be poor, she’d go with China. An Indian latrine cleaner may get to vote, she says, but a Chinese one is far less likely to be viewed as completely subhuman.
Aceface
January 9, 2009
8:34 am
Roy Berman
January 10, 2009
9:16 am
Of course, the question really isn't about what it's like there today-it's about a bet over what the two countries will be like in 20-30 years. I don't think many people in 1980 expected China to come out like it did in the 2000s.
YT
January 12, 2009
1:06 pm
Eddie
January 14, 2009
5:33 pm
Civil rights would seem to me to be far more necessary for survival, let alone success, in India than in China. Pogroms are alive and well in India on a monthly basis and will continue to be so for decades to come, regardless of the laws, especially considering the thuggish backgrounds of so many Indian politicians and police.