Abstract
For the past many decades, comparative work on India and China has largely circled each other rather than engage with each other. Explorations of cultural history have been an exception to this, but then here the purpose has not been to compare but to document. The comparison, be it of social policy, grand strategy, foreign policy or their respective engagement with the global economy in its various aspects, tends to be dominated by explanations that prioritise the difference in regime types. This approach elides differences in historical experiences to focus on similarities in economic trajectories. There is also wide and uncritical acceptance of the trope that India is a low-capacity democratic regime and China is a high-capacity non-democratic regime. Beyond Regimes takes issue with this approach to present a historically based comparison to examine the nation-making and development projects of these two countries. Duara and Perry identify three historical or circulatory forces, as they refer to them in the book, namely as ‘overland and maritime trade, Buddhism, Islam, opium trade and tea’ and link them to three specific temporalities. These are (a) struggle of state and nation-building; (b) logic of citizenship and rights; and (c) respective responses to globalisation and neoliberalism. The book advances a comparative approach located at the intersection of these circulatory forces and temporalities, calling it a ‘convergent comparison’. The contributors to the book move the level of analysis from territorial state to institutions and processes of state and address a range of empirical cases ranging from labour, capital, migration, education, welfare, protest and constitutional development.
The main argument of the book is that as India and China responded to challenges of decolonisation, state-building and globalisation, despite dissimilar regime types, they have produced similar outcomes in how the state is experienced by their citizens. This argument seems counterintuitive in the face of a whole body of comparative work placing India and China at contrasting ends of the political scale. However, the empirical case in the book bear out the main argument, some to a greater degree than the others, establishing ‘convergent comparison’ as valuable addition to this field of study.
Mark Frazier’s study of labour unions in Shanghai and Mumbai moves the level of analysis from the national to municipal/local/state level that allows for observing outcomes of labour reforms without necessarily pegging them to regime type. In both cities, the state prioritised building of political infrastructure through labour organisations in the early period. Similarly, in responding to the challenges of globalisation, both India and China prioritised the role of private capital in integrating with the neoliberal economic system.
T. G. Suresh, in his study of construction labour in India and China, establishes that in both cases the state has willingly withdrawn from labour welfare in the construction sector and moved to align its interests with private capital. Sanjay Ruparelia, in his focus on constitutionalism and activism, traces similarities in political experiences of the ruling dispensations and citizenry in India from the 1970s to the present. Ruparelia argues that regardless of the difference in regime type, India and China have seen similar outcomes in the exercise of rights-based activism even if their political grammars differ significantly. This is a startling conclusion and successfully challenges the dichotomy of regime type that dominates much of the comparative work in this field. He does conclude that democratic India still has greater potential for constitutionalism than China, but this is expressed more as a hope for the future than a grounded analysis.
Manjusha Nair accords regime type prominence, but yet concludes that in both locations protests tend to fall somewhere between the typology of righteous and rightful resistance allowing the state to delineate the boundaries of protest. Again, this makes for a discomfiting conclusion pushing one to re-examine the idea that formal democracy by and of itself can produce democratising outcomes. Comparing the welfare systems in the two countries, Nara Dillon argues that in both places pre-reform welfare programmes were less effective than those in the post-reform period. Here, Dillon identifies truncated state capacity in both countries as responsible for failing to build an effective welfare regime in their process of nation-building. Each of these cases offers a conclusion that is opposite to what a regime type comparison would suggest. Kapur and Perry take a step forward and contend that regime type-based arguments have actually produced counterintuitive effects in the sector of education in India and China. Prevalent logic in political economy literature suggests that democracies are more likely to invest in universal education than authoritarian regime. This has clearly not been the case in India and China, with the latter investing more heavily and successfully in basic education. This chapter provides a somewhat uncritical treatment of the education sector as one geared to targets rather than as a social process that is routinely appropriated politically by the state. Kapur and Perry contend that the normative role of education, ‘to make for better citizens or fairer and more resilient societies’, is not only poorly understood in India and China but also little debated within the universities. While the authors are right in asserting that the approach to higher education is instrumental in both countries, a distinction must be made here between the two countries. Institutional spaces of education have produced many vibrant student movements in India fulfilling the normative role of education in building engaged citizens. The issue here is not how successful or transformative these movements have been, but that the institutional space for this exists. While in India many political parties have used and abused this space, none can own it the way the Chinese Communist Party does in China.
Kellee Tsai brings territorial affiliations to the transnational flows of trade, technology and migration and expands the definition of state to include local state and expands ‘society’ to include diasporic locations. Min Ye points to the dissimilar challenges that India and China faced in instituting a foreign direct investment (FDI) regime. In these two chapters, the attempt is to move away from methodological nationalism to seek similarities in local processes of entrepreneurship.
Beyond Regimes’ lens of ‘convergent comparison’ allows us to compare India and China in terms of social and human costs of state-building in areas where India and China do not necessarily come in contact with each other. It would be instructive to apply this approach to a new set of issues where India and China have an adversarial or conflictual relationship. Would then the conversation on regime type be of relevance? How would questions of territorial conflict, climate mitigation, defence modernisation or border communities in the Himalayas lend themselves to a convergent comparison?