Last month marked the twentieth anniversary of the visit to China by Rajiv Gandhi. This was the first visit to China by an Indian prime minister after 34 years. Though it went almost unnoticed in India, China marked the event with a two-day seminar in Beijing on “China and India in the 21st Century”.

As a participant in that seminar and in discussions thereafter, it gave me an opportunity to reflect on the marked changes that have taken place in China in the intervening two decades, as well as on the human impact of such changes. At the time of Rajiv Gandhi’s visit, China was already a decade into its reforms, whereas we were still three years away from embarking on ours. In the period that followed, much to our chagrin, China remained inexplicably a more attractive destination for foreign investment than India in spite of the perception that India’s relative advantages in the use of the English language for business, and its established and recognized legal, banking and stock market processes should give the country an edge. Paradoxically, the English language and free media seemed to make India’s ills more transparent, whereas the mystique and opaqueness of China obfuscated its blemishes. Clearly, China had the advantage. It became a manufacturing hub for the world. In contrast, we continue to seek an acceptable approach to our rehabilitation issues surrounding the claims for land needed to support integrated manufacture. China would find such obstacles incomprehensible.

Where India has succeeded, in the information-technology sector, China is benchmarking this country for best practices. China’s stated target is to transform its identity from “Made in China” to “Created in China”. The Chinese perceive the basis of India’s success to be the use of the English language as a teaching medium. In pursuit of this, we were shown an experimental school in Beijing for primary education in the English language. Interacting with the 10-year old children there, unrehearsed and at random, we realized that their conversational skills in English were remarkable, even though neither their parents nor even their school headmaster spoke the language. And this was not a high-fee paying private school as would be its equivalent in India, but a State enterprise as a pilot for other Chinese schools of the future.

In truth, of course, we have leveraged a legacy of our colonial past. But it is worth remembering without effacement that it emphasizes both India’s ethnic heterogeneity and our choice of freedom of speech in every sense. The complex fabric of India did not comfortably permit the imposition of a uniform single language, as the Chinese did with Mandarin. And democracy gave sufficient voice for dissent in the 1960s to prevent the submersion of regional languages and culture.

But China’s uniformity has given it a homogeneous sense of purpose. The transformation of Beijing prior to the Olympics has created enviable boulevards comparable to Paris, and suburban avenues that look European. In her recent book, Smoke and Mirrors, Pallavi Aiyar gives a vivid account of the forced demolition of city blocks to literally pave way for the change. We tried such demolitions in Delhi in the mid-1970s, during the Emergency — our only experiment with unilateralism. And anyone attempting such forced dislocation again would do so at his peril.

Beijing’s environmental clean-up required draconian restrictions on vehicle entry into the city, reinforced further earlier this month by even stricter anti-pollution measures. In contrast, Calcutta’s relatively mild attempts to introduce more benign fuels for autorickshaws have met with violent resistance. In our democratic system, apparent intransigence will only be overcome by acceptable compromise.

Urban renewal in Beijing and Shanghai has been accompanied by severe restrictions on domicile being linked to holding a job in that city. No job means no permission to stay, and that prevents any sense of overcrowding. Residential blocks are necessarily modern with a uniformity that looks attractive as a development project but, from the experience of other cities elsewhere in the world, eventually lead to anonymity and to crime. Spanking new malls dominate new market areas. But as Aravind Adiga writes in The White Tiger of Delhi’s unseen “markets behind the market”, walk a couple of hundred yards away from the malls and you will find houses as small and as congested as you would in any Indian city. Very few of the old hutongs — single-storied buildings in narrow alleyways — remain in Beijing. Visiting some of those that do exist, one is provided evidence of how, until even recently, joint families lived here as in India around a small courtyard and a common kitchen. The human cost of the upheaval must have been enormous.

China’s sense of purpose is evident, too, by the overwhelming presence of youth, a result of its one-child policy. Whether shop-assistants or their customers, travel guides or interpreters, the public seemed incredibly young in comparison to its equivalent in India. China’s educational policy has been more successful than ours in making vocational education appealing and jobs more aligned to training.

In contrast to the Indian youth’s craving for educational degrees, often of doubtful quality and rarely related to the ultimate jobs sought, China now has as many students joining courses for vocational education as for formal secondary education. Chinese graduates, who have studied abroad, are being encouraged through tax incentives to return to China.

Further, China is taking advantage of the global recession by aggressively recruiting Chinese professionals presently living abroad. Its approach to human resource planning is holistic, matching educational qualification to future requirement in the manner that corporate planners do, but, in India, neither the Central nor the state government seems to understand this. We, too, are a nation of the young and Indian leaders often boast of the demographic advantage we will have in the decades to come with a larger ratio of people in the productive phase than the rest of the world, including China. But that window of opportunity can only be seized if we have HR policies to meet and match those aspirations.

Recently, the phrase, ‘Chindia’, has been coined, as if the two countries are in consonance in their approach to the rest of the world. But both in formal and casual conversation, it is evident that the Chinese do not regard India as serious competition. They are heavily invested in the United States of America, and will do whatever it takes to retain the competitiveness of their currency whether India is in alignment or not. Concerning relations with India, the Chinese refer to mutual suspicion, unresolved border problems, issues with Tibet and the Dalai Lama as areas in which India needs to change its mindset. Less palatably, a commentator from the Xinhua said that the general view of the Mumbai terrorist attack was that “it had destroyed the big-country dream of India”, and that Chinese news reports on India tended to be “at best neutral, at worst hostile” in an endeavour to boost China’s nationalism.

Not surprisingly, in view of its close relationship with Pakistan, the Chinese attribute India’s problems with terrorism to the non-resolution of the Kashmir dispute. What has been a surprise is the proximity of these views to recent statements by the British foreign secretary, David Miliband, supported by their foreign office spokesman, urging India to seek “lasting resolution of the issue of Kashmir which takes into account the wishes of the Kashmiri people”. Seemingly, both China and Britain choose to ignore the success of the recent elections in Kashmir, evidently reflecting the choice of the majority of how it wishes to be governed.

The underlying message is that India’s diversity and freedom require the ballot box to be the arbiter for the majority’s choice and the bulwark for the way forward. It may create contradictions and ambivalence as in, say, West Bengal’s approach to investment or its approach to environmental pollution, but it will ultimately result in majority support towards a humane resolution, which is implementable. The process is frustrating, noisy and will almost certainly hinder India’s competitiveness with China. But who can foretell the impact on China of the underlying disquiet when protests can no longer be suppressed?