China's great growth story has come at a cost: Manoranjan Mohanty

Rising inequalities, environmental degradation, social alienation and absence of civil liberties have accompanied this narrative, says former Professor of Delhi University

Manoranjan Mohanty, a former Professor of Delhi University whose recent publication China’s Transformation: the Success Story and the Success Trap, has been widely acclaimed, reviews 70 years of the People's Republic of China in an interview with Aditi Phadnis. Edited excerpts:

1) What can India learn from China, 70 years on?
 

Choose your own path of development. Learn from history, but innovate a strategy of transformation that suits your specific situation. As the People’s Republic of China celebrates its 70th anniversary, many in India think that China’s reforms should inspire India and other developing countries to follow that path. But that will be a mistake. China’s seven decades of social transformation, particularly the 40  years of reforms, pursuing the model of state-led market reforms, no doubt achieved tremendous economic success, especially, alleviating mass poverty, raising people’s livelihood standards, building world class infrastructure and acquiring enormous industrial and military strength and global influence. Every Chinese is proud of this accomplishment and the world must congratulate China for this. But it has come with a cost. Rising inequalities, environmental degradation, social alienation and absence of civil liberties have accompanied this success story.

“No force can ever undermine China’s status, or stop the Chinese people and nation from marching forward” — this was the most quoted line in world press as well as the Chinese media from President Xi Jinping’s speech on October 1. China’s top leader was asserting China’s nationalism in strongest possible terms, throwing challenges to the world.

Should India follow this path of national assertion? Many Indians today may opt for that. But was that the vision of Rabindranath Tagore and Mahatma Gandhi? They had rejected the western model of nationalism and industrialisation and hoped for a democratic, pluralist, egalitarian, federal, a nature-friendly, a morally inspiring India where peace, equality and freedom for all individuals, groups and regions would be the guiding principles. As India observed the 150th birth anniversary of Gandhi on October 2, this must be underlined.

2) Somewhat like India, China has been held together by a vast and complex bureaucracy but the organising principles of this bureaucracy are very different from India. How do you see the bureaucracy and attendant problems — corruption, adaptability and flexibility —  evolving in the coming years?

The political and administrative systems of India and China have one common element, but two major differences. Centralised control through the civil service, a security apparatus and financial resources are the common factors in both the systems despite India’s multi-party democracy and China’s Communist Party-led authoritarian polity.

The Chinese cadre system spreads over the party and the government with personnel often moving from one to the other. Party’s Organisation Department at the Centre is comparable to the Personnel Department under the Indian Prime Minister’s Office.

The differences accrue from the competitive party system and the role of the judiciary and the media. In India, different parties in power in the state governments can pursue their own policies. Citizens can approach the courts and the press.

But these differences do not remove the scope for corruption in either country. The magnitude of corruption was so high that after coming to power, Xi Jinping made anti-corruption his top agenda and achieved a degree of success. It was the corruption scandals that led to the defeat of the Congress in 2014 elections in India. The source of corruption in both the countries is the same — private connection behind big financial, often global deals. The neo-liberal economy that relies a great deal on risk-taking, discretionary decisions allows such transactions that violate the rules. The anti-corruption drive in China and India with new levels of institutional vigilance in recent years have made some differences in both the countries. But settling scores with political rivals and finding ways of getting the ruler’s choices enforced, still go on.

The assumption that digital transactions soaring high in both the countries will eliminate corruption is belied by the fact that technologies of cheating and hiding are as advanced as making the process transparent, fast and easy. The age old check in the form of a vigilant public — citizens using RTI in India and social media in China — continues to grow in both the countries while the techno-managerial or silicon bureaucracy evolves its new forms of centrally monitored governance and surveillance in India and China. 

3) Will China revisit its policy of the nationalities question, given the challenges it is facing?

It is unlikely that the Xi Jinping leadership will change its policies on Xinjiang and Tibet. The large scale crackdown on dissidents and demonstrators in Xinjiang was accompanied by “mass education camps” on the one hand and enhanced investment in development projects in Xinjiang on the other. These camps were decried as “concentration camps” abroad. But if it is true that after a period of “skill training,” the camps were being closed down and people sent back home before they were recruited for various jobs, then it is a new initiative. But there was no sign of giving substantial political autonomy either to Xinjiang or to Tibet. That is unlikely in the wake of a new wave of “national rejuvenation” that would not brook any challenge to central leadership pursuing a global agenda of a rising power. But this strategy has become more and more costly and unsustainable worldwide wherever demand for autonomy is suppressed. In case of Hong Kong, the fair implementation of “one country, two systems” respecting its autonomy is the key issue.

4) One of the biggest challenges before President Xi Jinping is to see the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) coming to fruition. He faces financial as well as operational challenges and hostility from many. What is the future of the BRI?

BRI is now a signature element of Xi Jinping Thought, a part of the PRC Constitution and theorised by China’s intellectuals as a new framework of international relations. The two meetings of the BRI Forum in 2017 and 2019 — the latter attended by 1,500 delegates from 130 countries including heads of states and governments from 23 countries have clearly stressed its significance. According to Chinese sources, China’s trade volume with BRI countries since 2013 had exceeded US$6 trillion and direct investment $90 billion creating over 200,000 jobs in the participating countries.

But the Chinese government is very much aware of the charges that are levelled against China on this question. That this project pushed countries to a “debt trap” and thus making them more vulnerable to Chinese hegemony are countered by China asserting that it was pursuing a “win-win” principle and launching only those projects that were acceptable to the local country.

But as the Indian objection to the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) illustrates BRI will continue to throw foreign policy challenges to China and the connected countries where security calculus will be weighed against economic benefits. But BRI as an extension of China’s global presence is going to stay and grow and the rest of the world has to make adjustments with this reality. Xi Jinping has staked his personal prestige and China’s national vision with it. But China too has to make adjustments to make it a credible non-hegemonic initiative in the tradition of the reciprocal “Silk Road” spirit. Already there are signs of it. Some projects like BCIM are now designated as bilateral and multilateral initiatives for cooperation outside the BRI. Many initiatives under BRICS and SCO are not part of BRI. At a time of an economic slow down in China, a readjustment in the BRI strategy may indeed be in the offing.

5) Prime Minister Narendra Modi described India’s problems with China as a “toothache”: He was presumably referring to the boundary dispute. Do you see this being resolved?

The Chinese press reports on foreign leaders’ congratulatory messages on China’s 70th National Day put Prime Minister Modi’s message above everybody else’s, even before President Putin’s. The forthcoming second informal summit of Modi and Xi in Mamallapuram on October 13 may indeed open new possibilities for faster development of the relations between India and China. It should be noted that there was broad consensus among India’s political parties on improving the relations, expanding them on all fields and even settling the boundary question along an overall framework based on the existing zones of control. Clarifying the lines of actual control based on “the political parameters and guiding principles” of 2005 or in common sense terms, realistic identification of a line   on give and take basis from the two sides, should not be an insurmountable problem.
 

But both sides have some pressure groups within their governments which use the boundary dispute as a bargaining chip. That has to change. The possibilities of India-China cooperation in the new era are enormous. Reaching $100 billion trade volume this year, five years late, was bad enough.(In 2002, Premier Zhu Rongji had set this goal for 2015). Actually, the “toothache” can be quite disabling. Even as competing powers, they need to close in on some issue such as the boundary, to compete and cooperate on economy, technology and alternative visions of global future, all of which are being debated within the two countries and globally.

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