No media debate on Asia is complete with0ut comparing India to China, or vice-versa. Even among middle-class media consumers, there is a barely disguised contempt for the slow pace of growth in democratic India, for all the “obstacles” in the path of progress and development, compared with the frenetic pace in The Middle Kingdom.
But is there a comparison to be made at all?
Is China really in India’s league, notwithstanding the growth rate, the forex reserves, etc? This is a CNN video of its Beijing correspondent attempting to go to Tiananmen Square on 4 June 2009, the 20th anniversary of the massacre, before being engulfed by umbrella-weilding “undercover” police.
As the legendary Atlantic Monthly correspondent James Fallows, now based in Beijing, writes:
“This is the kind of thing that makes you hold your head and say: Rising major power in the world?”
And this, on top of a ban on Twitter and Facebook, and censorship of television stories which begin with “In China today…” or “Twenty years ago in Bei….”
Also read: James Fallows: The June 4 report
T.J.S. George in China: Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V, Part VI
IJR 