Graham Allison
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When India overtook China in April to become the world\u2019s most populous nation<\/a>, observers wondered: Will New Delhi surpass Beijing to become the next global superpower? India\u2019s birth rate is almost twice that of China. And India has outpaced China in economic growth for the past two years\u2014its GDP grew 6.1 percent last quarter, compared with China\u2019s 4.5 percent. At first glance, the statistics seem promising.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This question has only become more relevant as Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi meets with U.S. President Joe Biden in Washington this week. From a U.S. perspective, if India\u2014the world\u2019s largest democracy\u2014really could trump China, that would be something to shout about. India is China\u2019s natural adversary; the two countries share more than 2,000 miles of disputed, undemarcated border, where conflict breaks out sporadically. The bigger and stronger China\u2019s competitors in Asia, the greater the prospects for a balance of power favorable to the United States.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Yet before inhaling the narrative of a rapidly rising India too deeply, we should pause to reflect on four inconvenient truths.<\/p>\n\n\n\n First, analysts have been wrong about India\u2019s rise in the past. In the 1990s, analysts trumpeted a growing, youthful Indian population that would drive economic liberalization to create an \u201ceconomic miracle.\u201d One of the United States\u2019 most thoughtful India analysts, journalist Fareed Zakaria, noted in a recent column<\/a> in the Washington Post<\/em> that he found himself caught up in the second wave of this euphoria in 2006, when the World Economic Forum in Davos heralded India as the \u201cworld\u2019s fastest-growing free market democracy\u201d and the then-Indian trade minister said that India\u2019s economy would shortly surpass China\u2019s. Although India\u2019s economy did grow, Zakaria points out that these predictions didn\u2019t come true.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Second, despite India\u2019s extraordinary growth over the past two years\u2014when India joined the club of the world\u2019s five largest economies\u2014India\u2019s economy has remained much smaller than China\u2019s. In the early 2000s, China\u2019s\u00a0manufacturing<\/a>,\u00a0exports<\/a>, and GDP were about two to three times larger than India\u2019s. Now, China\u2019s economy is about five times larger, with a GDP of $17.7 trillion versus India\u2019s GDP of $3.2 trillion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Third, India has been falling behind in the race to develop science and technology to power economic growth. China graduates nearly\u00a0twice as many STEM students<\/a>\u00a0as India. China\u00a0spends<\/a>\u00a02 percent of its GDP on research and development, while India spends 0.7 percent. Four of the world\u2019s 20 biggest tech companies by revenue are Chinese; none are based in India. China\u00a0produces over half<\/a>\u00a0of the world\u2019s 5G infrastructure, India just 1 percent. TikTok and similar apps created in China are now global leaders, but India has yet to create a tech product that has gone global. When it comes to producing artificial intelligence (AI), China is the only global rival to the United States. China\u2019s SenseTime AI model\u00a0recently beat<\/a>\u00a0OpenAI\u2019s GPT-4 on key technical performance measures; India has no entry in this race. China holds 65 percent of the world\u2019s AI patents, compared with India\u2019s 3 percent. China\u2019s AI firms have received\u00a0$95 billion in private investment<\/a>\u00a0from 2013 through 2022 versus India\u2019s $7 billion. And top-tier AI researchers hail primarily from China, the United States, and Europe, while India lags behind.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Fourth, when assessing a nation\u2019s power, what matters more than the number of its citizens is the quality of its workforce. China\u2019s workforce is more productive than India\u2019s. The international community has rightly celebrated China\u2019s \u201canti-poverty miracle<\/a>\u201d that has essentially eliminated abject poverty. In contrast, India continues to have high levels of poverty and malnutrition. In 1980, 90 percent<\/a> of China\u2019s 1 billion citizens had incomes below the World Bank\u2019s threshold for abject poverty. Today, that number is approximately zero. Yet more than 10 percent<\/a> of India\u2019s population of 1.4 billion continue to live below the World Bank extreme poverty line of $2.15 per day. Meanwhile, 16.3 percent of India\u2019s population was undernourished in 2019-21, compared with less than 2.5 percent of China\u2019s population, according to the most recent United Nations State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World report<\/a>. India also has one of the worst rates of child malnutrition in the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Fortunately, the future does not always resemble the past. But as a sign in the Pentagon warns: Hope is not a plan. While doing whatever it can to help Modi\u2019s India realize a better future, Washington should also reflect on the assessment of Asia\u2019s most insightful strategist. The founding father and long-time leader of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew, had great respect for Indians. Lee worked with successive Indian prime ministers, including Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Ghandi, hoping to help them make India strong enough to be a serious check on China (and thus provide the space required for his small city-state to survive and thrive).<\/p>\n\n\n\n But as Lee explained in a series of interviews published in 2014, the year before his death, he reluctantly concluded that this was not likely to happen. In his analysis, the combination of India\u2019s deep-rooted caste system that was an enemy of meritocracy, its massive bureaucracy, and its elites\u2019 unwillingness to address the competing claims of its multiple ethnic and religious groups led him to conclude that it would never be more than \u201cthe county of the future\u201d\u2014with that future never arriving. Thus, when I asked him a decade ago specifically whether India could become the next China, he answered directly: \u201cDo not talk about India and China in the same breath.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Since Lee offered this judgment, India has embarked on an ambitious infrastructure and development agenda under a new leader and demonstrated that it can achieve considerable economic growth. Yet while we can remain hopeful that this time could be different, I, for one, suspect Lee wouldn\u2019t bet on it. Graham Allison When India overtook China in April to become the world\u2019s most populous nation, observers wondered: Will New Delhi surpass Beijing to become the next global superpower? India\u2019s birth rate is almost twice that of China. And India has outpaced China in economic growth for the past two years\u2014its GDP grew 6.1 percent last quarter, …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":6805,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[183,218,172],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6804","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-asian-issues","category-reports-and-articles","category-172"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ameforum.net\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6804","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ameforum.net\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ameforum.net\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ameforum.net\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ameforum.net\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6804"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/ameforum.net\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6804\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6807,"href":"https:\/\/ameforum.net\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6804\/revisions\/6807"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ameforum.net\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6805"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ameforum.net\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6804"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ameforum.net\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6804"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ameforum.net\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6804"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
(Source: Foreign Policy Magazine)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"