Matrix: internal, external, closed, open

ARTICLE: Debating The J Curve: The Best Case for India, from: Fareed Zakaria, to: Bill Emmott, Slate, Tuesday, Oct. 17, 2006

Worth reading. Two smart guys in a great discussion. I especially like Emmott's distinctions on China (externally open and until quite recently extremely internally closed) and India (internally open and until recently externally closed).

Thanks to Tom Mull for sending this in.

Comments

[TM Lutas]

Yes, an interesting discussion but one thing really grated on me.

In East Asia, South Korea had a military dictatorship as recently as the mid-1980s, one that performed a Tiananmen-style massacre on its own people in 1980 at Kwangju. So, just as Ronald Reagan was denouncing the Soviet "evil empire," his government was turning a blind eye to a massacre in a country in which American troops were based. Whether South Korea moved to democracy a decade or so later because of American encouragement toward openness or because its growing affluent middle class demanded it is a moot point.

Of course, the incident happened during the Carter administration. Richard Holbrooke and Warren Christopher might have played roles in providing a green light.

The discussion point could have been made equally well about the "human rights first" Carter administration but that would have been an uncomfortable truth to be published in a magazine of Slate's leanings.

A strongly federalist India will eventually have more and more governments open themselves up to the outside and the growing gap between rich and poor will increase the pressure over time to open up to the outside. I thus am more bullish on India than either of the two worthies in the discussion. I am also more wary on the PRC. If the optimistic case is a year or three of turmoil, possibly with tanks rolling in the streets, that strikes me as an inherently unpredictable time. That isn't to say that it's unpredictable in a "great power war with the PRC" sort of way but unpredictable in that you can get significantly different national outcomes depending on individual bullet trajectories.

Here is an example from the past. I think that Prof. Culianu's assassination in Chicago measurably lengthened Romania's transition from the Ceausescu nightmare years to a modern free state both due to ending his personal reform efforts and the chilling effect the assassination had on others. The latter I say from personal experience. I had never heard about Culianu until after his assassination but it certainly gave me pause and would have changed my behavior even more were I in my present family situation.

The recent repression of the heavy breathing Qi Gong variant that I will not name here in order to get past PRC censorship filters says to me that there are plenty of people willing to expend ordnance in today's PRC. It makes their next 10 years inherently unpredictable as we hardly know the important players, much less which of them are going to fall to a bullet when crunch time hits.

When that unpredictability is absorbed by the market (I believe it is not today) negative pressures will build as people start to diversify their outsourcing elsewhere for safety.

[Andrew]

Hello, this is the first time I posted here. I have seen so India vs China debates recently, which a lot of them started by Indians themselves. No matter how they put form their arguments, they always uniformedly come into one conclusion: India will succeed in the long term because India is a democracy, China is not. I guess I shouldn't blame them since they are Indians.

However, I would like to make the fellowing points. It is wrong to assume that the Chinese are not reforming their own political system. China actually has been doing elections in thousands of villages for quite sometime now. And many of these officials elected are not Communists at all.
I also disgree with Zakaria about China cannot choose economic stability before political stability. Expereince in Russia, Taiwan, and South Korea taught us people pursue economic freedom before their political freedom. In this aspect, China is just following other countries path.

And is it reasonable to blame every India's shortcoming on "democracy"? When the Indians explained their shortcomings vs China, they blamed it on democracy. When asked why they are better than China, they say because India is a democracy. So which one is right?