It is impossible to carry out precise historical analysis in a short
essay of the very many factors that led the Chinese and the Indian peoples down
very different paths to independence and development. A synoptic pastiche is
all that is attempted here. It goes without saying that the two great
neighbouring civilizations, insulated from each other by the high ranges of the
Himalayas, has little contact with each other during their five-thousand
year-old histories, except for the visit of Chinese monks fifteen hundred years
ago, and the journey of Buddhist missionaries to China. While the Celestial
Kingdom ruled most of China for most of her recorded history, the Indian
peoples developed different cultures and institutions under rulers who were
rarely allied except for the period of high Mogul rule. Even then, the last of
the great Moguls, Aurangzeb, campaigned for years trying to keep the Empire
together. If the governance of the Chinese people could be said to be unified
under imperial institutions, a mandarin bureaucracy, and a common script, the
Indians were divided by over a dozen main languages, and a highly stratified
caste system overlaid by deep religious divisions, which persist to this
day. Laws and rules regulating ownership
and tenancy rights over land, civic duties of different communities, and taxes
to be paid again varied according to region and history. Neither civilization
was a stranger to invasion, but in both histories, invading rulers were tamed
by the superior cultures they encountered, and were in turn absorbed by them.
However, the European invasions from the 18th century onwards had
very different impacts. India became a full colony, and the ‘jewel in the
crown’ of the British Empire. China was reduced to semi-colonial status, and
torn apart by rival European powers and later by Japan, as neo-imperialist.
By step-wise conquest from Clive’s great victory at Plassey in 1757 to
the ‘Sepoy Mutiny of 1857, the British had penetrated almost all of India, and
established administrative rule, unlike as in China where the British and other
European powers were concentrated in treaty ports and treading concessions,
without the burden of direct rule. Alliances were formed with the Princes of
India to defeat each other. The Nizam of Hyderabad supported Wellington in
defeating both Tippu Sultan of Mysore and the Marata power, and was made the
premier prince of India under British paramountcy. The great Indian textile industry, the
greatest sector of employment other than agriculture, was destroyed, and India
from being an exporter of textiles to South-East Asia, east Africa and Europe,
became an importer of cheap cloth from Manchester. Sustainable farming for
village communities was also destroyed, farmers being forced to grow cash crops
of opium and indigo to swell British trader profits. Through the so-called
‘permanent settlement’ ownership of highly productive land was vested in a new
class of Zamindars, which made revenue collection much easier but also
dispossessed the peasantry from traditional communal ‘ownership.’ For failure
to pay rents, lands could now be sold, and the ranks of landless agricultural
labourers swelled to great proportions.[1]
Emiseration of the rural countryside also destroyed the thriving artisansal
classes of India. Mercantile financial institutions which had survived the
decay of the Mogul Empire started to collapse, and economic power passed into
the hands of British companies and their Indian dalals. Even more damaging,
cooperative social relationships between economically interdependent castes was
shattered, later enabling the British to follow a policy of divide and rule by
exploiting differences between Hindu and Muslim communities.[2]
The Chinese peasant economy, on the other hand, was never completely warped by
foreign domination; nor could foreign intervention socially divide the people
into opposing camps. While the old merchant class withered, the new class of
collaborative ‘compradors,’ who profited from European trade also produced some
staunch nationalists.
On the other hand, many able and liberal British administrators also
left their mark in India. To facilitate rule, a vast infrastructure of roads
and railways came into being. Ports were opened up and electricity introduced.
A great new Indian Army was recruited, under tight British command, to protect
imperial interests, and an efficient civil service instituted to rule India. A
vibrant social reform movement took place in the 19th century, which
attacked traditional reactionary customs, and embraced British democratic
liberal institutions.[3]
A burgeoning middle class found recognition and employment within the new
institutions. Neither the new middle classes nor the peasantry had any great
feelings of loyalty to the defeated aristocracy. The small British army present
in India during 1857 would have been easily destroyed if large parts of India
had risen to support the old order. On the contrary much hope was placed in the
new liberal order, and the new legal profession produced most of India’s
reformers and political leaders, such as Gandhi, Gokhale, Srinivas Sastri,
Tilak, Nehru. When great famines swept the land in the 19th century,
the British did find an administrative remedy in the effective famine relief
measures.[4]
Resentment against foreign rule in India was channeled by the new
middle-class leadership; first in the ‘Swadeshi’[5]
movement to stimulate local production; and later to demand ‘home rule.’
Growing resistance to British rule developed in step with increased oppression,
and the passing of the infamous ‘Rowlatt’ and other ‘black’ acts.[6]
Idealistic revolutionaries produced nothing more than isolated acts of
‘terrorism.’ The people, traditionally divided on caste and religious lines,
could only be brought together on safe constitutional issues, such as the ‘ Salt satyagraha,’[7]
when millions openly protested against having to pay a tax on salt. Mahatma
Gandhi unique political strategy was to mobilize the masses in non-violent
non-cooperation, many times with women in the lead, and protected by his image
of holiness.[8]
The British hold on India was retained not mainly by arms, but largely by
consent having exploited to the full the various divisions in society. It was
Gandhi who could combine political objectives of freedom, with social
constructive work, brought forward from the earlier reform period, and all
invested with an aura of spirituality that the British found irksome, perhaps
dishonest, but rarely rebellion enough to initiate a slaughter. Even then,
General Dyer did perpetrate the Jallianwala bagh massacre at Amritsar in 1919,
which radicalized even larger parts of society.[9]
Even when Gandhi moved to demand full independence in the ‘Quit India’ movement
of 1942, the Congress party leadership, representing sizeable middle-class
interests would not call for all-out rebellion. Even in terms of dealing with
the World War, the leadership was divided. Nehru supported the war effort
against Fascism, Subash Chandra Bose raised an army under the Japanese; Gandhi
said he would have nothing to do with violence from either side.
When the British left India, with ‘universal respect and goodwill,’[10]
power had been passed safely into the hands of a large middle-class, unmatched
in any other Third World country, which included the National Congress Party,
the British-trained Indian Army, and huge civil service, and business interests
that had succeeded in entrenching itself.[11]
Landlords and rural elites who controlled the peasantry became more and more
integrated with the middle-class. The British administration and the
middle-class never lost power; the leadership, especially charismatic persons,
like Gandhi and Nehru, and Indira Gandhi after him, retained mass loyalty at all
times. Caste and religious differences kept the poor divided. While widespread
economic poverty and even destitution persists, crises have been managed with
skill by leaders. Even during the worst crises in India after Independence,
when the old leadership was gone; India was ‘borrowing’ over 10 million tonnes
of grains every year to meet minimum food requirements; and when a ‘Red’
revolution seemed in sight with the rise of the Marxist-Leninist naxalites, the
adroit handling of the crises by the ruling elite, and the lack of a mass base
for the revolutionaries kept India firmly on a social democratic path of
development.[12]
The collapse of the Manchus produced entirely different results.
The fall of the Empire and the war-lord years that followed produced no
growth of a capable nationalist middle-class. Administration collapsed in vast
areas for years to come. The indisciplined armies of the war lords and the
Kuomintang ranged the countryside, adding to people’s misery. The Foreign
traders were as rapacious as the early East India Company, but not as capable,
or liberal, or with long-term interests as the British of the Empire. This is
why, Dr. Sun Yat-sen was forced to turn to the Soviet Union for support. The
early Chinese communists were as dogmatic as the Indian, but Chiang Kai-shek’s
campaign of slaughter broke their hold on the revolutionary movement. Mao’s red
bases in Yenan may still have been broken in the early years, but the
Kuomintang had the Japanese invading armies to contend with. The Second World
War distracted the Western powers from sending important help to Chiang; when
it came, the Kuomintang too corrupt and the Red Army too disciplined and
experienced to make any difference.[13]
Even the Soviet Union was fighting a war to the death with fascist Germany, and
fortuitously left Mao Zedong and the Chinese communists to their own devises to
build socialism with ‘Chinese characteristics.’
Mao was an extraordinary leader of people.[14]
He was a Confucian scholar before he was a marxist; enough of a peasant not to
be terrified of their uprisings; a poet soldier who could discipline an army
without being a tyrant. The Yenan Red bases enabled him and the Red Army to
gain time; to recruit people; learn how to win people’s confidence; how to serve
them; and how to develop from the bottom up, building people’s institutions of
power. Though Mao even in the 1940s contemplated a struggle of even a hundred
years, complete victory came surprisingly easily, the people exhausted by the
Kuomintang’s and the Japanese cruelties.[15]
The Yenan years[16]
laid such a sure base of socialist practice that despite the adventures of the
Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, the Chinese people had been
empowered to regain full control over their economic and political destinies.
The success of Deng Xiaoping’s market economy may be traced to those early hard
years of social practice.[17]
Historians who prize the role of great leaders may see the differences
of personality between Mao and Gandhi reflecting the different paths China and
India took. Economic historians can find valid clues in the economic structure
of the two countries when under foreign control. Sociologists will undoubtedly
see the differing class compositions in the colonial period affecting final destiny.
Theologians will mark the difference between the practical ethics of Confucius
and the more mystical concept of ‘karma.’ Military historians would agree that
few corrupt third world armies can stand up to the guerilla tactics of
disciplined revolutionaries. A. J. P. Taylor concludes an essay on the Great
War by quoting the soldiers who were stuck in the mud: “We’re here because
we’re here because we’re here because we’re here.”[18]
Bibliography
Books
Belden, Jack. China Shakes the World. England: Penguin Books, 1973.
Chandra, Bipin. India’s Struggle for Independence. Delhi: Penguin Books, 1989.
Chatterjee, Partha. Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World.
Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1986.
Han Suyin. The Morning Deluge. London: Jonathan Cape, 1972.
Ma Hong (Ed). Modern China’s Economy and Management. Beijing: Foreign Languages
Press, 1990.
Menon, V.P. The Transfer of Power in India. Chennai: Orient Longman, 1997.
Nehru, Jawaharlal. The Discovery of India. London: Meridian
Books, 1956.
Selbourne, David. An Eye to India. England: Penguin Books, 1977.
Selden, Mark. The Yenan Way.Cambridge,Mass: Harvard University Press, 1972.
Sen, Amartya, and Dreze, Jean. Hunger and Public Action. New Delhi:
Oxford University Press, 1999.
Snow, Edgar. Red Star over China. England: Penguin Books, 1972.
Stavrianos, L.S. The Global Rift: The Third World Comes of Age. New York: William
Morrow & Co.,1981.
Taylor, A.J.P. From the Boer War to the Cold War: Essays on Twentieth-Century Europe.London:
Hamish Hamilton, 1995.
[1] Jawaharlal Nehru, The
Discovery of India ( London: Meridian Books, 1956), 294-301.
[2] Bipin Chandra, India’s
Struggle for Independence ( Delhi: Penguin Books, 1989), 408-413.
[3] Bipin Chandra, 82-90.
[4] Amartya Sen and Jean Dréze, Hunger
and Public Action ( New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), 122-124.
[5] Bipin Chandra, 124-134.
[6] Bipin Chnadra, 181.
[7] Bipin Chandra, 274-276.
[8] Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist
Thought and the Colonial World ( Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1986),
85-125. Chatterjee discusses how the
Gandhian ideology was used by the bourgeoisie to mobilise the peasants, but not
have them participate.
[9] Bipin Chandra, 182-184.
[10] V.P.Menon, The Transfer of
Power in India ( Chennai: Orient Longman, 1997), 437. A phrase used by the
almost ‘official’ historian of the process is indicative of the bonds between
the British and the Indian middle-class that came into power.
[11] L.S.Stavrianos, The Global
Rift: The Third World Comes of Age ( New York: William Morrow and Company,
1981), 712.
[12] David Selbourne, An Eye to
India ( England: Penguin Books, 1977), 81-94. Selbourne provides an
impassioned journalistic account of the ‘debates’ with the Indian
middle-classes in the early 1970s comparing the Indian and the Chinese road to
development.
[13] Han Suyin, The Morning Deluge
(London: Jonathan Cape, 1972), 513-544.
[14] Edgar Snow, Red Star over
China ( England: Penguin Books, 1972), 108-113.
[15] Jack Belden, China Shakes the
World ( England: Penguin Books, 1973), 436-460.
[16] Mark Selden, The Yenan Way. Cambridge,
Mass: Harvard University Press, 1972), 208-277.
[17] Ma Hong (Ed), Modern China’s
Economy and Management ( Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1990), 481.
Between 1952 and 1978, foodgrains production had doubled reaching 304 million
tonnes by 1978, and industrial production increased to 1,634.1% over 1952
figures by that same year.
[18] A.J.P.Taylor, From the Boer
War to the Cold War: Essays on Twentieth-Century Europe (London: Hamish
Hamilton, 1995), 187.
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