The Chinese media: You have been saying what improved the relationship between China and India... so as the foreign minister, what is your plan? What exactly… (inaudible)
External Affairs Minister Salman Khurshid: There are some objective things, and there are some subjective things. The objective thing is we need to work together on addressing the trade deficit... To be sustainable, a trade relationship has to be a balanced one. If there is an insurmountable difficulty of being able to address in the short run the issue of trade, of balancing trade, then you can set it off against investment. So, it is possible that you have investment flows from one country to the country that has trade surplus so that an overall economic balance between the two countries is established. This is what we are working together to do between India and China, looking at how we can balance our trade, but also that in the short run to offset an imbalance of trade through investment.
But investment stand-alone itself is important because in today's world, there are two important ways how you get people to come together, not just governments but people to come together. One is by having cultural exchanges - in culture, I include sort of education and soft culture like tourism and so on - and the other one is by investment.
If you have a Chinese company investing in India, producing in India, and have a huge number of Indians working for the Chinese company, that is a stronger bond than you can provide by opening an embassy because you are dealing with people's immediate aspirations, which is a job, food, employment security and learning to work together... what they call work culture. I think that it is our aspiration that there should be some really conspicuous big Chinese investment projects in our country, as indeed we are encouraging our companies to go to China. Some of our business organisations have established offices for outreach in China. A lot of our businessmen are now exploring opportunities in China. There are joint projects and collaborations that are taking place in areas such as steel. But we must always keep in mind that we are both partners and competitors.
There will be market places where goods from both countries will be on the shelves, and we will have to compete. Maybe you would get an upper hand in certain goods, and we will get an upper hand in certain goods. In certain cases, you will just have to have a greater choice to give choice on a menu that gives both the Chinese product and the Indian product...
But at the same time, the same selection process will continue in the market place as well where you have some strengths and we have some strengths. But, as our prime minister has said, the world is a large enough place to allow India and China both to work and to live in very comfortably, sometimes holding hands, sometimes walking together, sometimes racing each other, sometimes as competitors, and sometimes as collaborators and partners. So, these are important dimensions and features of our relationship, and each dimension and each aspect has to be worked upon, either encouraged or actually physically and intellectually worked upon to ensure that we get the best for our people.
Chinese Media: What is your understanding of China's importance within India's foreign policy in the background of global pictures?
Khurshid: China's place in the world, both historic as well as in terms of an economic power, is well known. At the same time, China has arrived late in certain places. In WTO [World Trade Organisation], for instance, China has just arrived. Therefore, you have to make your mark in WTO. Now you have many complementarities with us as far as WTO is concerned, and we vigorously supported your presence in WTO. Russia again is new to WTO and the Russian industry will be in a sense adjusting and accommodating to it. But both Russia and China still have to, I think, pick up domain knowledge of WTO and begin to contribute more substantially and more effectively to WTO...
I do not think that we can say immediately, instantly we have to agree on everything. It is a process of dialogue by which we learn from each other's experiences and factor in each other's aspirations. So, this is for us very important and, therefore, you can see that while we want friendships across the globe and China has friends across the globe, and not all of our very fast friends are your fast friends, and not all of your very fast friends are our fast friends. But there are many that we have in friendship in common.
We cannot be absolutely completely alike because our circumstances are different, our aspirations are different, our historical experiences are different... I hope that what I am saying about China, I hope you will hear from the Chinese leadership about India as well because we are proud to be able to say we have made remarkable strides as far as economic growth and development are concerned. Of course, in many ways China is far ahead of us because despite having a strong socialist system, China went into the economic reform at least a decade before us. We came a decade later. And China is on a faster track of reform than we are. Our reform requires consensus building all the time. In China, you are led from the front, you are led from the top and you are able to show the advantage of reform very quickly to the people, so get an endorsement from the people for reform...
Our historic experiences could be different, and therefore, we may have to put in more effort to align our future aspirations. If your past is different, your future to be aligned requires greater effort. If your past is similar, then your future is easier to align. But this is something that both sides know and we have worked towards this and periodically we will go fast, periodically we will slow down depending on circumstances that prevail in the world. But I think the direction is very clear. India and China collaborating to give substance to people's belief that the 21st century is the Asian century, is an imperative. India and China have to collaborate for the Asian century.
External Affairs Minister Salman Khurshid's interaction with the Chinese media based in India, in New Delhi on May 8
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