Yesterday, I posted part 1 of my interview with Tom Barnett. Today, Tom explores a theme from his recent book Great Powers (and you can read it on your Kindle).
GP: Drilling down on China and India, your books and blog capture many of the differences of the progression of these two countries. In your book you compare China's trajectory to the Alexander Hamilton path, and India's to Thomas Jefferson's ideal. Can you summarize this argument for readers who may not have read your book? In addition, assuming you're correct on China, we have a reasonably good idea where this well worn path leads, but where might India's Jeffersonian path lead? This is more unproven as it scales out, correct?
Thomas Barnett: China chooses to industrialize and move up the production chain in a lock-step fashion, in the manner of Hamilton’s preference that America replicate Britain’s rapid industrialization path—Deng channeling Hamilton. India, with its Gandhian reification of village life, simply hasn’t pushed the same urbanization effort that China has, thus it hasn’t been forced to industrialize to the same degree in order to provide urban-based manufacturing jobs to displaced rural workers. As a result, India has only a small fraction (single millions) of its working population laboring in the formal manufacturing sector, compared to China’s well over 100 million. In contrast to the normal development path, India has sought to leapfrog into the services sector, succeeding magnificently on a global scale but employing only a tiny fraction of its educated population.
Both countries naturally face competitive pressures over time from smaller countries that seek to out-India India on services and out-China China on manufacturing, on the assumption that those two countries’ labor costs will inevitably rise, which they are.
At initial glance, China’s route has higher risks concerning its political system (all those unruly and increasingly assertive urban laborers can go all Marxist on Beijing’s allegedly “communist” ruling party), but India has higher risks concerning its economic trajectory (you point about scaling out badly). It’s just easier to imagine—for me at least—China having to change politically than India somehow avoiding industrialization and the social tumult/reformatting it will cause the country’s rural life. China’s got a lot of that already under its belt (although its rural impoverished population remains vast, there are plenty of opportunities for village employment or migration to the cities), and its government seems willing to do whatever it takes to encourage and accommodate the migration from rural areas to cities. But India moving far more tepidly in this direction, the result being that, what rural-to-urban migration does occur, often results in rather scary urbanization scenarios (more slumdog than millionaire).
In the end, it’s really amazing that we have these two experiments running side-by-side at the same time: the democracy that doesn’t push its people too hard but then puts its economic development more at risk; and the authoritarian system that does push its people plenty and then puts its political development at risk. For a political scientist like myself, this is the most interesting political experiment I’ve ever come across—far more interesting than the Cold War.
Indeed, its two experiments running side by side with well over 2 billion people in the sample set.
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