India seems unable to match China on technocratic talent

The world’s newest most populous country faces steep challenges

- PANKAJ MISHRA

In a historical shift, India is surpassing China to become the world’s most populous country. But the question of whether India can realize its demographic dividend and outperform ageing China economically does not go far enough. More attention is due to a fundamental and oddly neglected issue: whether India’s government has the technocratic capacity to transform the country into a major economic, scientific and tech power like China.

For more than half a century since Mao Zedong’s calamitous Cultural Revolution, well-educated leaders have mapped China’s trajectory to modernization. Mao devised quack solutions for China’s challenge of rapid industrialization, such as making steel in family backyards. But his colleagues began to check his ideological excesses even while he was alive. Since Deng Xiaoping’s momentous tenure, China has seemed able to tap its available intellectual potential no matter who is in power. Cheng Li, director of the John L. Thornton China Center at the Brookings Institution, argues in a forthcoming book that Chinese President Xi Jinping, considered more autocratic than his predecessors, has empowered a new generation of experts in IT, aerospace, 5G, robotics, AI and more. Many of these technocrats have experience competing globally at China’s state-owned enterprises.