You write in The Elephant and The Dragon, 'China is flying along fast as a dragon, India is trudging into the future, steadily as an elephant.' What are the prime differences in these momentous journeys and what are the implications?
The similarities are that India and China are both enormous economies and the fastest-growing big economies in the world. And that's why people often lump them together and call them the silly name of 'ChIndia.' In a few short years, China and India have become a source of employees, co-workers, customers and competitors to the West. In boardrooms from London to
Frankfurt, executives in recent years have contracted India fever in the same way they caught China fewer a decade ago. Business leaders from the West who don't know the difference between a curry and a stir-fry have been checking into newly built five-star hotels. They have been shuttling halfway around the world because the two up-and-coming nations are growing so rapidly that they make the economies in America, Europe, and Japan seem as if they are standing still.
Suddenly, doing business in India and China has become the only hope for Western companies determined to quickly add new
customers -- the only way for Western executives to make stockholders happy.
But many American executives and policymakers have not understood how these two Asian giants are progressing along different paths.
To understand how China is flying like a dragon, you must see how a quarter century after it began its transformation, hundreds of millions of Chinese have seen their prospects improve dramatically. The Chinese economy has blasted off. Foreign companies have poured more than $600 billion into China since 1978, far eclipsing what America spent on the Marshall Plan to save war-raged Europe after 1945.
The foreign investment in India is far smaller than in China. Foreign companies' investment in India was just about $7.5
billion in the fiscal year that ended in last March. The companies invested the same amount in China every six weeks. India's economy was lumbering alone, while China's was flying into the future.
Photographs: Artists carry dragons during the offical opening of the Shunyi Olympic Rowing-Canoeing Park on July 28, 2007 in Beijing. The venue, built for the 2008 Olympic Games, is the world's only first-class rowing-canoeing venue to contain both flat-water and slalom courses. Photograph: China Photos/Getty Images
Also read: Indian IT tigers keen to rule China
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