The China-India Comparison with Lots of Facts – Part 1/5

December 31, 2011

This post was originally a result of a comment on the China Law Blog, which chastised me because, “He wanted me to provide a super-quick summary of The Economist cover story comparing India with China, but it (I) did not,” which was correct then.

Returning to this subject is because of my twelve-part debate with Troy Parfitt. Mr. Parfitt claimed, “Corruption in India isn’t germane to the debate.” In fact, most if not all of the facts and comparisons used during the debate were not relevant according to Mr. Parfitt unless those facts supported his opinions of China.

At one point, Mr. Parfitt mentioned reviews of his book in Publisher’s Weekly in defense of his book not being racisit. He claimed the South China Morning Post didn’t say that. Neither did Publishers Weekly, the Korean Herald, The Vancouver Sun… and none of the Amazon reviewers [that may change].

However, Publisher’s Weekly [PW] did say this of his book, “The result is mostly travelogue told from an outsider’s perspective, contextualized with overviews of major events in Chinese history. Parfitt argues that China will not rule the world, because as a nation it is more interested in the appearance of success than actual substance. He suggests that culturally, China has little to offer…” In addition, PW says, “his book lacks the precise facts and figures that he decries in other books promoting Chinese dominance.”

Basically, this is what the China Law Blog complained of in my post, Comparing India and China’s Economic Engines.

The facts and figures missing from Mr. Parfitt’s “Why China Will Never Rule the World – Travels in the Two Chinas” are important as the China Law Blog says. To judge one country without comparing its government, economy and culture to other countries offers no balance for readers to make informed decisions.

Continued on January 1, 2012 in he China-India Comparison with Lots of Facts – 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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Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

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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A Snapshot of Democracy in Asia – Part 5/6

October 1, 2011

Among the so-called Asian democracies, India is next.  The Guardian says of corruption in India “All your life you pay for things that should be free.”

The Guardian reported that “one ordinary man” had to pay at least a third of his income to survive. “Of the 40,000 rupees (£520) I earn a month from my restaurant, I pay at least a third in bribes,” Vishal, 26, said. But bribery also extends into his personal life. Vishal has two young children and to get the eldest into the best local school he paid a “donation” of 25,000 rupees (£340) in cash to the headmaster.”

Economy Watch.com said, “India’s underground economy is believed to be 50 percent of the country’s GDP – US$640 billion at the end of 2008,” and Janamejayan’s Weblog goes into detail of one scam that cost $40 billion, which is 3% of India’s GDP.


Poverty in India, 2011

In addition, there is confusion over how many live in poverty in India.

In 2009, the United Nations Development Programme reported that literacy in India was about 74 percent, while the CIA Factbook set the literacy rate at 61 percent (literacy and poverty are linked), which explains The World Bank’s estimates of poverty in India at 41.6 percent.

However, the Hindustan Times says for 2011 that there are 406 million poor in India, which is a third of the population—an increase of 8% since 2009.

In addition, a study by the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative using a Multi-dimensional Poverty Index (MPI) found that there were 645 million poor living under the MPI in India

In 2009, India’s population was about 1.2 billion and the country had 6 nationally recognized political parties and about 46 recognized state/provincial parties. Source: List of Recognized Political Parties in India (Wiki)

India has been the world’s largest democracy since 1947, and although India claims to have reduced poverty from about 53% in 1973-74 to  25.6% in 1999-2000, the definition and difficulty in reporting the exact numbers casts doubt on this claim.


Poverty in Calcutta

However,  in the same time span, China reduced poverty from 64% to less than 3%, and China is not a multi-party democracy.

In addition, according to Time’s Global Spin, a blog about the world, its people and its politics, “The size of India’s middle class was 50 million in 2005, according to this report by McKinsey,” and McKinsey may be wrong and the number may be lower.

In contrast, Martin Trieu, President of Tourmaline Capital, estimates “there are at least 250-300 million people (in China) who now fall into this (middle class) category.”

Helen H. Wang of Forbes Magazine’s China Tracker agrees with Trieu, and says, “Today, China’s middle class is already larger than the entire population of the United States and is expected to reach 800 million in fifteen years.”

Continued on October 2, 2011 in A Snapshot of Democracy in Asia – Part 6 or return to Part 4

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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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China’s Goals for Going Green

July 18, 2011

Until recently, the United States was the largest consumer of energy in the world.

To put that in perspective, Americans make up only 5% of the world’s population and yet consumed 20% of the energy the last year the US was number one.

Now, China, with about 20% of the world’s population, consumes more energy than the US.

In 2010, China consumed 4,190,000,000-megawatt hours of electricity to serve 1.3 billion people, while in 2009, the US consumed 3,741,485,000-megawatt hours of electricity for 310,880,317 people. Source: Wikipedia’s List of countries by electric energy consumption

A better idea might be to compare India to China since these countries have similar sized populations. Nation Master’s energy consumption chart shows India in 6th place with 568,000,000-megawatt hours consumed, while China used more than 7 times that number.

China’s goal is to have a middle class equal to America, which may reach as high as 66% of households.

Do a little math and you soon discover how much energy China may have to produce to support a middle class of about 858 million people, which is 66% of 1.3 billion.

In fact, China may need to produce about 16 billion-megawatt hours of electricity to achieve that goal.

Along with those numbers comes another staggering headache — pollution and a potential environmental disaster of epic proportions.

However, China is struggling to deal with this challenge by going green.

The June 2011, National Geographic Magazine (NGM) asked this question — Can China Go Green? Then attempted to answer it.

NGM said, “No other country is investing so heavily in clean energy. But no other country burns as much coal to fuel its economy.”

One unidentified Beijing-based official said, “China seeks every drop of fuel—every kilowatt and every kilojoule it can get a hold of — for growth.”

“That Chinese consumer revolution has barely begun,” NGM said. “As of 2007, China had 22 cars for every 1,000 people, compared with 451 in the U.S.”

Discover more at China’s Middle Class Expanding, China’s Middle Class Defined, Copy Cat Middle Class in China and The Middle Class Bulge.

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the lusty love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

#1 - Joanna Daneman review posted June 19 2014

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China’s Holistic Historical Timeline

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Posted by Lloyd Lofthouse

Boiled in Blood

March 28, 2011

While brutal and corrupt authoritarian dictators in Egypt and Tunisia (supported by Western democracies for decades) were swept away by popular uprisings and a bloody revolution raged in Libya’s Qaddafi land, the Western media made comparisons to China.

The Economist’s Banyan|The wind that will not subside says, “But it is in China that domestic parallels with recent events, above all in Cairo, are on most people’s minds.”

What parallels and which minds?

According to a recent 60 Minutes segment, the uprisings in North Africa were caused by widespread corruption, poverty and unemployment (fallout from the 2008 global financial crises, which caused global losses of about 64 trillion US dollars and millions of lost jobs — 9 million in the US and about 20 million in China — not counting the rest of the world).

When the dictators in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya attempted to stifle unrest with violence, citizens posted pictures on Facebook of the killings and brutality, which led to the revolutions.

There is no guarantee that these revolutions will result in successful Western style democracies.

Another parallel that fails to surface is Facebook. The Wall Street Journal says, “Facebook…doesn’t have operations in Mainland China.”

As for poverty, The World Bank says, “Between 1981 and 2001, the proportion of population living in poverty in China fell from 53 percent to just eight percent,” and Global Issues.org says, “China accounts for nearly all the world’s reduction in poverty.”

Meanwhile, World Hunger.org reports American, “Households with incomes below the poverty line (19.2 percent).”

In addition, to paint China with the same brush as Egypt, Tunisia and Libya, the Economist attempted to rewrite the definition of dictatorship: “China is a dictatorship of a party, not an individual”.


No Wonder the GOP wants to cut funding for  PBS – the truth hurts!

That “party” has more than seventy million members and decisions are based on consensus. The last dictators that ruled mainland China (Mao) and Taiwan (Chiang Kai-shek, who was supported by the US) both died in 1976.

When the United States won the revolution against the British Empire in the 18th century, only 10% of the colonial population was allowed to vote (white men with money and/or property).  

Does that mean the early US was a dictatorship?

The Economist also quoted an editorial on the Caixin Website, saying “Autocracy manufactures turbulence; democracy brews peace.”

Really?

If the Caixin Website were correct that “democracy brews peace”, explain the Guardian’s report of India’s hidden war. “Entire villages have been emptied as tribal communities flee from the burnings, lootings and killings. The civil conflict has left more than 50,000 people camping under tarpaulin sheets without work or food along the roadsides of southern Chhattisgarh.”

India is the world’s largest democracy, but India has fought border wars with China, Nepal and Pakistan.

In addition, while China reduced poverty dramatically, India has done almost nothing for more than six decades.  According to Azad India Foundation, nearly 38% of India’s population (almost 400 million) lives in poverty.

If “democracy brews peace”, it must be boiled in blood, which is evidence that America’s Founding Fathers were right about democracies being ruled by mobs.

Discover Border Crossings and the Blood on Our Hands

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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.

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