Sound policies drive progress
China’s astounding development pace inspires policymakers around the world, say Indian experts
China’s economic transformation has proved to be an inspiration to policymakers and analysts in many countries around the world, Indian experts said.
B.R. Deepak, a professor of Chinese and China studies at the Centre of Chinese and Southeast Asian Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, has watched China’s progress over the decades.
He recalled his impressions from visits in the early stages of the country’s opening-up. “In 1991, when I first visited Beijing, it was a sort of construction site and there was a lot of dust all around,” he said.
“In 1996, when I visited Beijing for the second time, I found that a lot of changes were taking place.”
He said that by 2003, the Chinese capital “seemed a totally different place”, with many new roads, overpasses, underpasses, high-tech buildings and shopping malls.
Some say the huge social and economic changes witnessed by Deepak, along with other Indian professionals and businesspeople, have led people in India to ponder the different approaches each country has taken, and how the neighbors can benefit from cooperation.
Noting China’s achievements in such areas as infrastructure, science and technology, and poverty alleviation, these observers have watched steps taken by Beijing that resulted in the country’s rise to become the world’s second-largest economy.
They described the development pace since the founding of the People’s
Republic of China in 1949, and especially since 1978, when reform and opening-up policies were introduced, as astounding.
The Communist Party of China’s farsighted leadership has helped the country lift more than 800 million people out of poverty and turn some once backward places into vibrant economic hubs.
In India, observers have focused on China’s development of world-class infrastructure. From an initial highspeed rail line in 2007, the Chinese network reached 40,000 kilometers by the end of 2021, according to China State Railway Group.
Sudheendra Kulkarni, who served as an aide to former Indian prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, was particularly impressed by the maglev system, with train speeds of up to 600 kilometers per hour.
Kulkarni, who founded the Forum for a New South Asia, which promotes cooperation between India, Pakistan and China, said China now has some of the best universities, museums and sports stadiums in the world.
Deepak, from JNU, highlighted the growth story of Shenzhen, Guangdong province, which rose from a fishing village to a dazzling megacity over just four decades.
Alka Acharya, a professor at the Centre for East Asian Studies at JNU’s School of International Studies, said she first visited China as a research scholar in the late 1980s. She said that she endured a long journey by train from Hong Kong to Guangdong province, then took another train, which featured a coal-fueled locomotive, to Beijing.
Acharya said that when she stepped onto a platform at the station in Wuhan, Hubei province, she noticed that it was a structure with very few amenities. Beijing’s railway station was huge, chaotic and badly in need of renovation, she added.
In 2016, when she traveled by express train from Beijing to Shanghai, it was an entirely different experience, with state-of-the-art train cars, spotless stations and streamlined services, Acharya said.
Swaran Singh, chairman of the Centre for International Politics, Organisation and Disarmament at JNU, said that thanks to the CPC’s close communication and cooperation with all sectors of society, it can readily implement its decisions and faces few institutional roadblocks.