Vikram Bedi Delhi

A spectre is haunting (not just) Indian nationalists so desperately keen on ‘development’: the ghost of a ‘China’ determinedly led by the communists, via miracle growth-levels, back to a position of global pre-eminence. There is, in India, a mixture of embarrassment, envy and fear that is increasingly encouraged and mobilised by Indian propagandists of growth-centric ‘development’ and economics.

Not being an ‘expert’ on either development or China, I felt incited to find out more, to do some research in order to get a better, less enchanted sense of what is happening in China and, ostensibly, not happening here. Surely, one suspected, this propagandist ghost of China was at some variance to its reality; surely, this was an example of the romance of development unleashed with such relentless intensity.

I discovered that Chinese hyper-growth has in recent years become almost ‘jobless’, that it is responsible for what is nothing less than an ecological holocaust, that it is brutal in its treatment of migrant workers as well as of those being peremptorily displaced by the gigantic projects that are so popular among Chinese political elites. It is also producing regional and class inequality at a rate that has already made China into one of the most iniquitous countries anywhere.

It has been doing a poor job of welfare-state activities. Instead it’s diverting its buoyant State funds to the armed forces, the teetering public sector (especially banks) and to the gratuitous provision of over-supplied and heavily subsidised physical infrastructure for firms and the urban upper-and middle-classes. The rule of law is weak while contacts, connections and informal networking, often corrupt, are too important. All this goes on without open, pluralistic public arguments about the costs and benefits, about who wins and loses in this breakneck economic growth.

Amid all the talk of the Chinese excellence at labour and intensive manufacturing, it is never mentioned that on an average China produces only around half as many jobs per percentage point of GDP growth as India. It is only now beginning to be recognised that the Chinese ‘model’ is deliberately hostile to domestic entrepreneurship which is why it is so over-dependent on foreign direct investment (FDI) from the Chinese diaspora, Japan, and the US.

Those advocating China as a model of an ambitiously muscular nation-state omit to mention the near-truth that it is a client state of the US, dependent on American hyper-consumer markets and having its monetary policy pretty much decided by the US federal reserve. If mention is made, finally, of the perverse effect of the one-child policy on the country’s sex-ratio, and of the frailties and handicaps of the Chinese regime domestically, that it is a good deal less coherent than is normally averred in India, the truth of the real thing begins to appear. This is at considerable variance from the ‘China’ offered up by Indian development propagandists.

‘China’ is, above all, a rhetoric deployed by the Communist Party of China. This is intended to shore up support by making a certain type of ‘development’ the cardinal guiding principle of the Chinese nation’s will to regain its former grandeur, strength and eminence. Hence the enthusiasm for hosting the Olympics, or the obsession with its booming mega-cities: glass office tower-blocks, high-rise condominiums; avid mimicries of the latest architectural and urban design fads of the West.

The ‘rhetoric of China’ is designed to pre-empt and disarm thought and action by disaffected citizens, who want, or could want, a more plural, fuller specification of national purposes. That is, not just growth but also equity, ecological health, greater democracy, freedom of spirituality, expression and dissent.

Chinese State-capitalism and its successes, then, are not just about market-oriented reforms, institutional redesign, and infrastructure — they can’t function without this rhetorical discourse, this nationalist ideology. This economistic, aspirational nationalism is the ‘spirit’ of the Chinese Sate-capitalist system. It is used to coordinate and motivate local, provincial and national elites and, more importantly, legitimise and authorise their stewardship of the Chinese nation.

There is a material price to be paid — the party under President Hu Jintao is being compelled to buy off the restive peasantry with promises of a new rural ‘socialism’, by spending billions of dollars on rural welfare and infrastructure. No matter how uni-focussed on GDP growth rates and the like, the developmental national ‘spirit’ always carries with it egalitarian promises, expectations and potential. This is why nationalism is the preferred register in which the disaffected and the left-out are increasingly beginning to speak out.

‘China’ is also a rhetoric deployed by business and, sometimes, political elites around the world, most notably here in India. China evokes the ‘spectre of international comparisons’ to suggest why the Indian polity must see modernity in exclusively economic terms; why what is good for Indian business houses and FDI-bringing multinationals is unproblematically good for everyone; why social and human development concerns (equality, social justice, environmental protection) are effeminate, moralistic, romantic concerns that are passÈ.

This rhetorical use of ‘China’ is not always a yearning for an authoritarian solution to the problems that businessmen face. It is more a yearning for the sort of ‘spirit of capitalism’ function that Chinese nationalism serves so successfully. Implicit in this view is the idea that Indian nationalism is too open to the contentious play of multiple identities (class, caste, region, religion) and plural public concerns. On this view, Indian nationalism lacks its Chinese counterpart’s uni-focus on economics; it is too ‘cultural’. On this view, we have taken the easy way out by telling ourselves tall tales of our ‘cultural’ ancient-ness, wisdom and superiority. Compared to ‘China’ our collective penury doesn’t shame us enough because we feel we have enough ‘culture’ to make up.

But this Indian ‘rhetoric of China’ isn’t likely to be all that effective. Admittedly, public and welfare goods -- and service-provision are, as yet, too poor in quantity and quality, for there to be a persuasive ‘rhetoric of India’. Instead, ‘India’ might try to be a model of how relative democratic excellence in very adverse social and economic conditions can be, combined with sustained, high growth-rates. But we are getting there.

After all, ‘development’ shouldn’t become a sacrificial religion of infinite desire as it has arguably become in ‘communist China’. That is why, the spectre of comparison with China should be permanently exorcised.