The China-India Comparison with Lots of Facts – Part 3/5

January 2, 2012

WATER — From National Geographic we have Mumbai’s Shadow City by Mark Jacobson—a slum holding 12 million people, who live in the middle of India’s financial capital.

Then there is Delhi with 17.3 million residents. One third of the city’s residents have little access to clean water. See Life in the Slums of Delhi, India

Foreign Policy magazine says, “In India, service delivery [of fresh water] will fall woefully short of demand in coming years across most urban infrastructure sectors.”

China, on the other hand, has long-term infrastructure projects and is drilling the world’s longest tunnel to carry water from the Yangtze River under hundreds of miles of mountains to reach Manchuria in the northeast.

Then in Tibet, China is building reservoirs to catch water from glaciers that are melting due to global warming while building villages to relocate Tibetan nomads who discover that the high altitude grasslands they once depended on to feed their herds has dried up and turned to desert due to lack of rainfall.

LITERACY — For a republic or democracy to thrive and survive the population must be literate to understand the issues and support a complex modern society.

However, according to India’s 2011 census, only 74% of India’s 1.2 billion people are considered literate in India —that means three hundred and twelve million people cannot read.

In China, literacy is more than 94% up from 20% in 1978.

What is taking India so long? It has had since 1947 to resolve this problem. What China accomplished in about 30 years, India has had sixty-four years to achieve as the world’s largest democracy.

“Adult literacy [in China]was given first priority in literacy campaigns [after 1976] designed to ‘sweep away illiteracy’ [saochu wenmang]. Because 80% of adults were illiterate, they were targeted as crucial for securing new China’s economic security.”

It may sound like a cliché, but being able to read is a form of power, and leaders know that literate and educated people have considerable influence. Source: China Philanthropy

The World Illiteracy Map says, “Illiteracy is one of the major hindrances that come in the way of economic growth. Literate manpower helps a country in developing.”

Continued on January 3, 2012 in The China-India Comparison with Lots of Facts – Part 4 or return to Part 2

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

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Note: This revised and edited post first appeared on October 22, 2010 as India Falling Short

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Comparing India and China’s Potential for Economic Growth

December 30, 2011

The cover for The Economist of October 2 – 8, 2010, placed a bet on India in an economic race with China.

The Economist wants India to win this race, because India is a democracy as is the U.S., but what isn’t mentioned is that China is evolving into a republic closer to the original republic that the United States was in 1776 with a Chinese twist, which is what Dr. Sun Yat-sen wanted.

Some claim China is ruled be a dictator today but that is not true. China is a republic that is guided by the word of law, which is the essence of a Republic.  In 1982, China wrote a new Constitution that spelled out the law and China’s schoolchildren are taught what these laws mean and how to live with them. However, the Chinese Constitution is not the same as the one in the US, so the laws are different.

I opened The Economist magazine and read the two pieces the cover was about. One was India’s surprising economic miracle and the second piece was A bumpier but freer road.

On page 11, I read, “many observers think China has done a better job than India of curbing corruption…”

On page 77, a Western banker was quoted saying, “It’s much easier to deal with the well-understood ‘organization chart’ of China Inc than the freewheeling chaos of India.”

Corruption exists in every country and Transparency International attempts to define and identify what global corruption looks like. Comparing China and India, we discover that while India’s corruption appears to be getting worse, corruption in China is improving due to the evolution of its new legal system.

In fact, in the past 3 years, the perception of corruption in India was 74%, [in the United States that perception was 72%], while in China it was only 46%.

In addition, the BBC reported recently, “Widespread corruption in India costs billions of dollars and threatens to derail the country’s growth…”

After I read both pieces in The Economist comparing China with India, it was obvious that India would never beat China economically without controlling its corruption, shrinking severe poverty and increasing literacy. Overall, the latest World Bank data shows that India’s poverty rate is 27.5% [330 million people], based on India’s current poverty line of $1.03 per person per day and an illiteracy rate of almost 26% [312 million people].

In comparison, literacy in China is more than 94% and the World Bank says in 2004, people in China living in poverty represented 2.8% of the population.

There are more reasons The Economist is wrong about India winning this economic race just because it is a democracy. One reason is that America’s Founding Fathers hated democracy and had a good reason.

Live Journal goes into detail on this topic. Live Journal says, “It would be an understatement to say that the (U.S.) Founding Fathers hated democracy. They warned against it vehemently and relentlessly. They equated it–properly–with mob rule.”

 

The Founders of the US, who hated democracy, built a free country [a republic]. Our [meaning many Americans] ignorance of history, which has led to a love of democracy, is causing the US to surrender its freedoms at an alarming rate.

Dr. Sun Yat-sen (1866 – 1925), known as the father of modern China [by both China and Taiwan], said he wanted to model China’s government after America but by combining Western thought with Chinese tradition.

When he said this, it was 1910, and America, by definition, was still a republic. Once you read the two pieces in The Economist, you may understand why India’s democracy cannot beat China’s growing republic.

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

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 This revised and edited post first appeared October 13, 2010.

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The India, China battle to eliminate poverty and illiteracy

November 2, 2010

Chris Devonshire-Ellis wrote a convincing piece at China Briefing that India‘s economic growth would speed past China in the near future. 

He says, “It (India’s) growth rate could overtake China’s by 2013… Some economists think India will grow faster than any other large country over the next 25 years.”

However, there are flaws in that opinion.

Once again, the foundation of this prediction is based on India being a democracy “where entrepreneurs are all furiously doing their own thing” while China is a culture of secrecy and censorship. Chris mentions a few of China’s other flaws too, which China is struggling to overcome.

What Chris doesn’t mention is the difference in poverty and illiteracy between India and China.

India and China both became independent about the same time—China in 1949 and India in 1947.  Due to Chairman Mao’s policies, China suffered horribly from 1949 to 1976 and little progress was made.

For China, most of the progress has taken place in the last three decades. India, on the other hand, has had more than 60 years to solve its problems.

Let’s see what each has accomplished.

The World Bank says, “that China’s record of poverty reduction and growth is enviable. Between 1981 and 2004 the fraction of the population consuming less than a dollar-a-day fell from 65% to 10% and more than half a billion people were lifted out of poverty.”

For India, the World Bank says, “poverty remains a major challenge. According to the revised official poverty line, 37.2% of the population (about 410 million people remains poor, making India home to one-third of the World’s poor people.” UNICEF shows the poverty in India to be 42%.

World Bank studies also established the direct and functional relationship between literacy and productivity on the one hand and literacy and the overall quality of human life on the other.

India’s literacy rate was about 12% when the British left in 1947. Today, literacy is 68%.

In China, literacy is more than 93% with a goal to reach 99% in the next few years.

This means that India has about 800 million literate people competing with 1.2 billion in China.

As for India succeeding, MeriNews.com says, “At a time when we (India) are poised on the threshold of becoming a superpower, the rampant malnutrition and prevalence of anemic children and women to the extent of 48 per cent of the population is a definitive indicator that we have failed as a democracy in ensuring the fundamental requirements of our citizens.”

It appears that China—with its censorship, secrecy and socialist government—has done a much better job of taking care of its citizens.

See the other posts on this topic at India Falling Short and Comparing India and China’s Economic Engines

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. 

If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.

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Growing Cautiously Into a Modern Republic – Part 5/7

October 24, 2010

In Part 6, I provided evidence that China is making progress at improving the integrity of its government and legal system.

Returning to the topic of literacy, why would China improve the literacy rate if the government didn’t want to become a republic since illiteracy is the greatest tool of a dictator?

Illiterate people are easier to brainwash, fool and control.

Imagine the effort to raise literacy from 20% in the late 1970s to more than 90% today. Then give birth to a legal system that China has never had before. Source: History of Literacy in China

Why waste this time if the goal wasn’t to build a republic with more freedom for the people?

In addition, China rebuilt all of its major cities, took an electrical grid in 1950 that produced a half megawatt of electricity in a few cities and spread that system over a country about the size of America in a few decades to serve a population of 1.3 billion people.

In comparison, the electrical grid in America took “much” longer to build.

Experts say that the growth that has taken place in China in the last three decades has never happened before in the history of global civilization.

If China wanted to stay a totalitarian government, why bother? 

After all, North Korea lives in a state of never ending Cultural Revolution. The people starve and have few freedoms. Why not copy them? Yet, after Mao, the Chinese repudiated Revolutionary Maoism and opened China to world trade. In fact, China is buying food from all over the world to make sure the people do not starve.

Today, millions of mainland Chinese are global tourists spending billions of dollars in European democracies and in the U.S.  There are also about one hundred thousand Chinese students in U.S. colleges and universities exposed to American ideas and democracy. 

Shouldn’t China’s leaders be worried about this exposure to democracy or is it possible this is what the Party wants?

Return to Growing Cautiously Into a Modern Republic – Part 4

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. 

If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.

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Growing Cautiously Into a Modern Republic – Part 2/7

October 23, 2010

In Part 1, I talked about how Sun Yat-sen was the father of China’s republic and how Chiang Kai-shek destroyed any chance of having a two-party republic after Sun died.

Even after the Chinese civil war ended in 1949, it would take decades to prepare the people so Sun Yat-sen’s dream becomes a reality.

By reading India Falling Short, you will discover what happens when a democracy or republic moves too fast from a feudal society to a modern one.

For a republic or a democracy to survive, people must be educated and literate.

In fact, literacy in the US is listed at 99 percent. However, studies assert that 46% to 51% of U.S. adults read so poorly that they earn “significantly” below the threshold poverty level for an individual. This means that the chances of the US surviving as a republic or democracy are grim.

In 1949, when the Communists came to power about 32% of the people above the age of 12 could read.

By 1976, literacy was 20% when Mao died. The reason literacy had dropped so much was because of Mao’s Great Leap Forward and The Cultural Revolution, which the nine top leaders of the Communist Party voted against.

Mao had those men eliminated or removed from power one at a time and went ahead with The Cultural Revolution.

Today, literacy in China is more than 90%. See China’s Literacy Policies

During the Tiananmen Square incident, Deng Xiaoping said that the Party wanted democracy for China, but Western style democracy would bring the economic growth to a grinding halt because the country (as India still is) wasn’t ready yet to become a democracy or the kind of republic Sun Yat-sen envisioned.

In 1989, China’s literacy program was in its infancy. Almost a billion people in rural China lived in conditions similar to serfs during Europe’s Dark Ages.  China’s cities had not been rebuilt.

Return to Growing Cautiously Into a Modern Republic – Part 1

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. 

If you want to subscribe to iLook China, there is a “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar.

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