BIZCHINA> Review & Analysis
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BIZCHINA> Review & Analysis
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Chinese characteristics vital in growth
By Madhav Nalapat (China Daily)
Updated: 2009-09-15 17:24 Until the 17th, rather the 19th, century, China and India led the world both in innovation and commerce, two fields that usually go together. Till the early 1800s, together they contributed more than half of the global production. But the systematic destruction of their local industries and enterprises by European colonizers reduced China and India to a pitiful condition by the beginning of the 1950s. The two neighbors had become overwhelmingly poor, and lacked the technology and knowledge to move forward. It was Mao Zedong's opening up to the US in the 1970s followed by Deng Xiaoping's economic reforms in the 1980s that reversed the stagnation of China, igniting successive waves of development.
 The reunification of Hong Kong with the Chinese mainland in 1997, and the subsequent preservation of its prosperity saw the re-emergence of China as a leading force in international geopolitics. By then, India's economic reforms, which started in 1992, had created a dynamism in its mercantile sector that had been absent since the British colonialists suppressed the local industries in the 1800s. Colonialism wrought havoc on the globe and its people. In Africa, Asia and South America, large numbers of people paid with their lives. The two world wars saw the European and other colonizers exterminate each other almost as comprehensively as they had destroyed other countries and peoples. An unintended con-sequence of the two wars was the weakening of colonialism and the subsequent liberation of China, India, Indonesia, Egypt and other countries from external rule. The human and ecological damage caused by European and other colonizers mandates that the group that gains primacy in human society in the future ought to draw a different road map for growth. The world cannot afford a replay of the carnage of the past five centuries.
Unlike the zero-sum consequence of the expansion of Europeans, the emergence of China (and later India) needs to be fashioned on the basis of mutual benefit, so that the rest of the world also enjoys its fruits, instead of shrinking further as was the case in the past. President Hu Jintao has highlighted the harmonious development of China. This concept needs to be expanded to refer to a similar process throughout the globe. China's and India's interactions with other countries have to be based on the principle of mutual benefit, rather than remaining rooted in zero-sum equations, where one side gains at the expense of the other. (For more biz stories, please visit Industries)
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