When the Chinese Buddhist monk Faxian traveled to India during the Gupta era over 1,600 years ago, he described what he saw as a sort of paradise:
The inhabitants are prosperous and happy. There are no Boards of Population and Revenue. Those only who farm the Royal demesnes pay a portion of the produce as rent. Nor are they bound to remain in possession longer than they like. The King in the administration of justice, inflicts no corporal punishment; but each culprit is fined in money according to the gravity of his offence; and even in cases where the culprit has been guilty of repeated attempts to excite rebellion, they merely have their right hands cut off. The chief officers of the king have all fixed salaries.
The recent science-fiction novel “The Three-Body Problem” is one of China’s most popular global exports, and a leading exemplar of Sinofuturism, a genre that explores the way in which China will lead the world economically, politically, and technologically in the future. Yet, India, one of a small handful of countries to successfully launch a satellite to the moon, does not feature at all in China’s most prominent work of futurism, in which China cooperates with the Russians, Europeans, Japanese, and Americans to combat an alien threat.
This encapsulates the dramatic shift in how India is viewed in the Chinese imagination, going from being a holy land to a place not even worth mentioning when considering the future. Today, the Chinese generally are indifferent, if not contemptuous, toward India.
This shift is not merely a function of modern geopolitical tensions. By the end of the Tang dynasty in 907 CE, Buddhism had assimilated into Chinese culture and Confucianism was resurgent, reinforcing China’s notion of its centrality. There was less reason for Chinese polities and people to idolize India. The historian Tansen Sen noted that the tenth century was a “watershed in connections between India and China” because interactions between the two “shifted from those that were dominated by Buddhism to exchanges that were fostered through commercial contacts.” When the Chinese admiral Zheng He sailed to southern India in the early 15th century, he treated many local kingdoms as Chinese tributaries.
Contemporary Chinese attitudes toward India are mostly shaped by the experience of the past 200 years. Many Chinese see India’s history as a lesson — and as a warning — for a path that China should avoid. It was commonly believed in China that India did not draw the right lessons from its past, which is that a country must modernize and out-compete the West in order to avoid a repeat of colonial-era subjugation. In the 19th century, visitors to India from the Qing dynasty saw India as a failed state and criticized Indians for failing to stand up to the British. One of these visitors, a political thinker named Kang Youwei, said: “Formerly, India was a celebrated nation in Asia, but she preserved her traditions without changing and so during the time of Qianlong [1736–1795] the British people organized a company with one hundred and twenty thousand gold [pieces] as capital to carry on a trade with her and subjugated the five parts of India.”
Herein lies the crux of why the modern Chinese are indifferent toward India. It is not because of contemporary geopolitical rivalry or the 1962 Sino-Indian War, which is barely commemorated in China — although the Chinese state does clearly see India as a rival in Asia, though not a peer. It is because the Chinese see Indians as not having absorbed the lessons that China did from its humiliation from the West. As a result, India remains backward, superstitious, and chaotic, and completely unable to rival China, as per stereotypes that are widely held in many Chinese circles, such as the question-and-answer website Zhihu.
In the novel “The Three-Body Problem,” civilization is portrayed as having gone through several progressive stages, culminating in a scientific temperament. This captures the direction of much of modern Chinese thinking. In the 20th century, starting with the May Fourth Movement of 1919, intellectuals and politicians in China have sought to overcome the traditions and customs they saw as holding China back, such as Confucianism. This, of course, culminated in the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) under Mao Zedong.
However, the basic idea that the nation should develop using the best practices available remains popular. The Chinese state’s ambition is to match the United States as the most powerful and influential nation, and as such, China measures its progress by this yardstick, which is demonstrated by concrete results. Herein lies another key difference between Chinese and Indian mentalities, at least according to Chinese sources. Wenjuan Zhang, professor and associate dean at the Jindal Global Law School in India, wr0te that “while the Chinese prefer outcome-based legitimacy, Indians are inclined towards procedure-based legitimacy.”
China’s recent economic and technological achievements are laudable and are largely the result of China’s scientific and manufacturing progress, much of which is derived from the West. But the people of China should look harder at India and not let their indifference or contempt obfuscate India’s accomplishments. These achievements not only include a thriving culture but also strides in high-tech manufacturing, space exploration, and defense. Any Chinese vision of the future that does not include India is woefully incomplete.