Where China Meets India: Burma and the New Crossroads of Asia (24 page)

Unlike Beijing which had torn down its architectural heritage and replaced its old buildings with the anonymous skyscrapers of the early twenty-first century, Delhi’s Islamic and British legacies confidently dominated the centre of the capital. Delhi had been the capital of a series of short-lived Turkish sultanates in medieval times, before being annexed by the Central Asian conqueror Timur Lang in 1526, and then by Babur, the founder of the great Mughal dynasty. There is still the mammoth Mughalera Red Fort, with its ornamental pavilions and crowded market stalls out front, and the beautiful garden burial complexes of the sixteenth-century emperor Humayun and Safdarjung, the eighteenth-century Nawab of Oudh. When the British built ‘New Delhi’ in the environs of the old city in the 1910s and 1920s, they drew on these earlier styles, using the rose-pink and yellow sandstone of the region, and decorating their imperial buildings with domes and wall-railings and sculptures of lions, snakes and elephants. Many of the buildings stand along Rajpath or the King’s Way, exactly as they had a century ago, stretching from India Gate, past Parliament House and the Secretariat, to Rashtrapati Bhawan, once the home of British viceroys, and today the residence of the president of India.

A much more human scale to things remained intact. I went several times to Khan Market. It was a warren of shops, including some very good if small bookstores, with a McDonald’s in one corner, small boutiques selling fabrics and imported men’s shirts, a fruit seller and a pharmacist, a few cafés, an Italian restaurant called Big Chilli and a Subway sandwich place. In one small passage way there was a wall of local and foreign magazines for sale, and very close by were two young women, one with luminous green eyes, sitting, rather than standing guard, in khaki-coloured uniforms, holding their Lee-Enfield rifles against the dusty ground. There was overgrown grass in the lots to the side, open drainage and cable wires dangling overhead, a few stray dogs and an ancient-looking petrol station. Chauffeur-driven cars, many of them the white Hindustan Ambassadors that have plied Delhi’s roads for generations, dropped off and collected elegantly dressed women and less elegantly dressed men. Property prices at Khan Market were, apparently, the twenty-fourth most expensive in the world (according to Cushman and Wakefield, a global estate agency). It was a list headed by Fifth Avenue and New Bond Street, and Khan Market, which appeared more like a village centre, was positioned between Orchard Road in Singapore and Beijing’s Wangfujing, with their huge and ultra-modern shopping malls. In China the sense was of everything being remade, the new overwhelming the old. Here the pace and manner of change suggested accretion–slower, but perhaps steadier change.

There are, however, grand predictions. Sometime over the next thirty years, India will in all likelihood overtake China as the most populous country in the world. And some believe that its economy will become the third biggest, after both China and the United States. The US investment bank Goldman Sachs, for example, has speculated that India’s economy may grow faster than any other over the coming decades, expanding to forty times its present-day size. And in India as in China there is a great confidence in the future, not universal, but amongst the young middle classes in particular. ‘Our parents’ generation was the most boring in history,’ said a university student I met. ‘Our grandparents’ generation was amazing: they were freedom-fighters and many went to jail to win independence. But then our parents just accepted the status quo and became salary-men and bureaucrats.’ Tall and lean, with a receding chin and thick black hair, he was studying at business school and said he wanted to be an entrepreneur. He felt India now had boundless possibilities and had moved past older, conservative mentalities. There was a great pride in being Indian and a strong feeling that the problems of today will without a doubt be overcome.

These problems are, however, severe. There is still very little in the way of modern infrastructure in nearly all parts of the country, and the economy is crippled by a lack of everything from highways to ports to running water. More than 400 million people have no access to electricity. The airports nearly everywhere are far worse than those in eastern Asia, including in Burma. There are the problems of endemic corruption, stultifying red tape, and bureaucratic structures that resist any attempt at quick and decisive action.

There is also a widening gap between the India that has benefited from the growth of recent years and the India that lags far behind. Nobel prize-winning economist Amartya Sen once warned that India risked becoming a country where half enjoyed the living standards of California and the other half of sub-Saharan Africa. In China there is an east to west slide in income. In India it’s the other way around. India is currently planning for two mega-industrial corridors, one linking Delhi in the north to Bombay on the west coast, another between Madras and Bangalore in the south, with projected investments of $150 billion in total. Already states (in the west) like Gujarat and Maharashtra (around Bombay) are industrializing fast and others (like the Punjab) benefiting from an agricultural sector that has become more profitable in recent years. Bangalore and Hyderabad are world-class centres in information technology.

Move eastward, however, and the picture is very different. It is as if there is an invisible line running through the middle of the country (say just east of Bangalore) where the economic juggernaut runs out of steam and a different subcontinent is revealed. This is not to say that there are not extreme income inequalities in every part of the country; there are, as in China. But there is also a very real geographical gradient: in Gujarat, for example, growth rates have run at about 12–14 per cent through most of the 2000s, while in the east, in Bihar and Orissa, growth has generally remained below 4 per cent. Not surprisingly, it is in this part of the country where the Indian state is confronting a newly invigorated Maoist insurgency. The Maoists, or Naxalites as they are often called (after the site of an early rebellion), are now active in no less than a third of all of India’s administrative districts, overwhelmingly those located in the east of the country, along a spine that runs south from Nepal and through West Bengal. They control large swathes of dense forest and have mobilized support from the aboriginal tribal peoples there–people whose lives are about as far away from the bright lights of Bombay and Bangalore as possible.

Further to the east are yet more problems, an even more different India. These are the states of the ‘Northeast’, up against the Burma frontier, also amongst the poorest in the country and wracked by insurgencies decades older than that of the Maoists. The Northeast, home to around forty million people, has long been a policy headache for New Delhi, and a linking up of militant groups from this region with the Maoists is seen as a potential security disaster. Whereas in other sections of the country ethnic differences, to a large extent, have been channelled into electoral politics, in the Northeast violent ethnic-based militias and separatist insurgencies are entrenched in the local scene.

There was thus an almost exact mirror of China’s situation. Whereas in China the poorer provinces and ‘autonomous regions’ were to the west and southwest, in India the poorer states were to the east and northeast. And for both China and India there was Burma, hovering along the edge, a potential crossroads, and building block for future economic growth. But the parallels end there, as we will see.

In the early 1990s, the government of India embarked on what was called its ‘Look East’ policy. The hope was to connect India better to the increasingly prosperous nations of the Far East, and there find new markets and new friends. Narasimha Rao was prime minister at the time and India was just starting off the process of economic reform that would soon boost the country into the top ranks of the world’s emerging economies. For decades the economy had been growing at just a few per cent a year, but this was now changing, and under Prime Minister Rao and his finance minister, Dr Manmohan Singh, many of the state controls that had long hobbled commerce and industry were being undone and the stage was being set for what would be two decades of unparalleled growth. New economic vigour called for new international relations.

To the west of India was its old foe Pakistan against whom it had fought three wars. Beyond Pakistan was Afghanistan, soon to fall under the Taliban, and Iran, under the ayatollahs. These were all places with deep historical and cultural connections to India, but an economically vibrant India would need to look for fresh partnerships in new directions.

India’s ties to eastern Asia were at the time extremely limited and India’s policy-makers believed that it was important to strengthen them. Countries like South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore were fast reaching first-world levels of income, and others like Malaysia and even Thailand appeared not far behind. Armed violence was abating throughout this region and a new era of prosperity seemed (almost) everywhere on the rise. In a near miraculous transformation, southeast Asia, which had been a byword for war and suffering in the 1960s and 1970s, turned itself into one of the most peaceful and economically dynamic parts of the world. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations, originally founded as a non-communist block, had by 1997 come to include all ten countries of the region, including the association’s one-time foe Vietnam. Tourism, trade and satellite television drew the peoples of the region together as never before. For tens of millions in the emerging southeast Asian middle class, consumerism replaced ideology. As India’s own economy opened up and grew rapidly, closer links eastward seemed a natural next step.

A natural partnership was with China. India’s and China’s economies were in a sense complementary. China’s strengths were in manufacturing and infrastructure, India’s in information technology and financial services. Current Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh has even coined the term ‘Chindia’ to describe his vision of a China and India that would cooperate closely and reinforce one another’s economic development. He has argued in many essays and speeches for a changed mindset, one that would overcome old suspicions and embrace more open borders. And since the early 1990s, trade has grown enormously, from practically nothing to nearly $60 billion a year in 2010. As there are calls in Yunnan for major investments in new trading ties with India, in India too there are those who are optimistic about the future for Sino-Indian business.

Many in India, though, are more cautious. There is a worry, for example, that with improved transport links will come a flood of cheap Chinese goods, overwhelming local industry. China is today the biggest trading power and the biggest exporter in the world, having overtaken Germany in 2009, with exports worth $1.2 trillion a year. India is still in a lowly twenty-first place and runs a trade deficit of $114 billion a year, $20 billion alone with China. Chinese businesses are already doing well in India’s consumer market but India has not had anything like the same success in China. What India exports to China is mainly iron-ore (about half the total) and other basic commodities.

But a more primal fear is a security one. Half a century after the Sino-Indian war, suspicions of China’s intent remain high in many quarters. Trade is increasing and there have been high-level visits between top leaders. But the border issues are still unresolved; there are differences of feeling over Tibet; concerns about China’s ties around the Indian Ocean; and very generally a shared sense of the two countries as rivals, now and for the rest of the twenty-first century.

It’s useful to take a step back and consider the very different international positions these two old civilizations are in. The People’s Republic of China includes within its boundaries all of Chinese-speaking ‘China proper’ (with the disputed exception of Taiwan). Hong Kong and Macau were returned by the British and Portuguese respectively in 1997 and 1999. But Communist China also includes all the areas Beijing sees as having once belonged to the Manchu or Qing Empire, including Tibet and Xinjiang in the west, as well as Manchuria and Inner Mongolia in the north. Yunnan, as we have seen, has also been brought under greater central control than ever before. With the exception of northern Vietnam and northern Korea (which were under Han dynasty domination 2,000 years ago), and some of the oasis states of Central Asia (which briefly came under Chinese domination during the Tang dynasty in early medieval times), China now controls everything it has ever controlled in the past, and then some.

India is in a very different situation. In its heyday, the British Indian Empire stretched all the way from the Khyber Pass to the Malay peninsula, including all of what is today Pakistan, India, Bangladesh and Burma. In 1937 Burma was separated from the rest, and then, at independence, the new nation of Pakistan was carved out of what was left. True, a colonial power had created the pre-1937 boundaries, but even under the Mughal emperors (and the Mauryans and Guptas in ancient times), ‘India’ included much of what is today Pakistan, India and Bangladesh together. And over the past half century, modern India’s relations with countries on its immediate periphery have drawn in nearly all of New Delhi’s foreign policy energy.

China is also a far more dominant economic power among the nations of southeast Asia, a region of ten nations that has a population of 600 million, twice that of the United States. China’s relations with many southeast Asian governments were frosty to non-existent during the Cold War, but by the 1990s relations had warmed considerably. It is now the region’s top trading partner (displacing the US in recent years), with total two-way trade approaching $200 billion in 2010. And in southeast Asia, China has a big advantage. For centuries, Chinese entrepreneurs and others just looking for a better life had migrated all across the region, and many had become rich and successful. They had come from China’s southeast coast, like the immigrants who ventured across the Pacific to America, and were famously good business men. In cities like Bangkok, Jakarta and Manila they became the merchant elite. And they formed the overwhelming majority of the population in Singapore, which had emerged as the financial capital of southeast Asia.