India actually isn't much like China at all!

I've been hitting the road in the spirit of truly comparative political science, going to last week to see my good friend and fellow field worker, Charlotte. I spent 8 days in Beijing. And now I can report back on all those "India versus China" comparisons one sees in The Economist, FT, and other papers. The outlines of the comparison that I had in mind going in: China is richer, but it's got an autocratic and corrupt system of government. India is poorer, but it's corrupt system of government is a democracy, so it might pull through in the end. (e.g. Thomas Friedman aka "that hack who has his own NYT colum despite the fact that he somehow thinks it is legitimate research to extract a whole theory of the Arab world out of happening to notice Chinese phone card salespeople" wrote on this point in 2005).

Still, even though I knew that these many journalistic comparisons all point out that China is the richer place (GDP/capita of about $7800 versus $3800 in India), I guess I still kind of thought that the presence of all these comparative pieces meant that the two countries were be more, well, comparable.

Now that I've been there, I'm amazed. Beijing is so fancy!!! There are so many skyscrapers and fancy malls. But it wasn't the private opulence that really struck me, but the lack of dump-like-ness that was so very un-Indian. We drove and walked over at least a fair portion of the city and I didn't see any shanty towns and only one beggar. The buildings are toasty warm , despite the snow outside, because of decent utilities. The roads have no potholes but do have sidewalks. And not just sidewalks but sidewalks with markings to aid blind people is recognizing they are coming to a curb. There isn't trash in huge piles anywhere. The buses are really clean and shiny. The cabs are all reasonably new cars and ALL of them use the meter instead of haggling for the price.

Of course, Beijing is also a showpiece city, especially with the Olympics coming up. The government no doubt threw a lot of homeless people out and maybe even razed housing to put up skyscrapers. And there are huge disparities between the city and the countryside. But even comparing oranges and oranges, India looks pretty bad. I live in India's capital and I've been to Mumbai, Kolkata, and Bangalore -- these are the cities that are getting India's new Chanel outlets, but they don't look like Beijing. And, frankly, India's government couldn't decide to raze the shanty towns of Delhi because of an up-coming international sporting event: doing so would create too much open space.

This is part of what makes political science so tricky. China scholars say their country is really corrupt. India scholars say their country is really corrupt. Scholars of both countries lament that the government is dependent on this corruption for stability so that even when the state wants to do something well, it often fails. But China's roads are SO much better. So, are China scholars just deluded about what actually constitutes "a lot" of corruption, sort of like when people in Florida wear sweaters because it is sixty degrees and, therefore, "cold"? Or is China somehow differently corrupt, in a way that makes its roads come out better?

Also, how do we figure out how important this "India is a democracy and China isn't" part of the comparison actually is? Particularly because both countries have a big gap between the laws on the books and what the judiciary actually does: so how much do the laws matter for the comparison? India is a lot more internally violent, though one can probably argue that China is more repressive. But both India and China get very, very bad marks from Amnesty International and keep parts of their country off-limits to foreigners, so how to know which country is likely to have more problems in future with internal stability?

I really want some of my China scholar friends to come here and tell me whether India looks like it is on track to be like China. China's GDP/capita is higher than India's. So maybe India is like China ten or fifteen years ago? Or maybe India is, as my boyfriend suggested, like "Bolivia if no one took care of it"? These options imply very different futures for my Indian friends.

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Stay tuned for more on "India versus China: Is this Comparison Really Worth Making?" series. Because I'm out of time now but I still have to explain my whole theory of how China's Olympic mascots reveal the reasons for differential success in population control between the two countries.