The ghost of China haunts all conversations about India. When US Deputy Secretary Christopher Landau visited New Delhi earlier this year, he declared directly: “We are not going to make the same mistakes with India that we made with China 20 years ago…” Today, as Secretary of State Marco Rubio heads to New Delhi for his first official visit since taking office, the comparison with China will follow him to every meeting. Washington once backed a rising Asian giant, the argument goes, and got burned. Why should India be any different?
This fear may be intuitive for Americans, but it takes China’s lesson exactly in reverse – and risks benefiting Beijing even more. The lesson from China is not to be suspicious of any rising power. It is about distinguishing between those who seek to overthrow the international order and those who are likely to strengthen it. And India, whatever its imperfections, has every reason to want the current system to continue.
The Chinese mirage
In hindsight, far greater skepticism was warranted the last time a large Asian civilization-state with a rapidly expanding economy sought Western support to accelerate its rise. Washington’s faith in globalization allowed Beijing to gut America’s industrial base, buoyed by the hope that a richer China would naturally become democratic and support global stability. Beijing’s revisionist ambitions have been systematically neglected in favor of market access: its aggressive actions in the Indo-Pacific region, its exploitation of the World Trade Organization, its extensive intellectual property theft and espionage, and its regular wolf-warrior diplomatic battles have all gone unnoticed for as long as trade relations have lasted.
The failure of the Chinese gamble could not be clearer today. Not only has China failed to liberalize its country or become a partner in strengthening the international order, but it has become the most formidable economic and political adversary the United States has ever faced. Never faced by the West, while eroding the West’s capacity to respond. The mismanagement of China’s rise has created the defining geopolitical challenge of this generation.
A growing number of observers fear that India could follow the same trajectory. Given the strategic influence demonstrated by China through its manufacturing strength, India’s ambitions to build a rival industrial base seem obvious. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s muscular regime, as well as his party’s intentions to further centralize power in election reorganization and exercising bigger state control raises eyebrows. The alleged assassination of a Sikh separatist in Canada – and of a tent one in the United States – combined with its most aggressive The nuclear brinkmanship with Pakistan strikes many Western observers as a worrying sign of what India’s rise means for a crumbling rules-based international order.
A different tradition
But there is a significant difference between becoming a more assertive power within the international system and seeking to subvert it. The major threats to today’s global order bear undeniable resemblance to their historical predecessors. Xi’s China, Khamenei’s Iran, and Putin’s Russia all reflect the continuation of centuries-old ambitions for regional or global pre-eminence that predate the current international system. China’s conception of itself as the “Middle Kingdom” at the center of the world, with a mandate to rule “all under the sky,” hints at its revisionist ambitions on today’s world stage.
Indian tradition is different. With the minor exception of the Chola and Kushan empires, India’s history of political expansionism is remarkably limited. Its founding political parable reflects a philosophy of restraint: the story of Emperor Ashoka Maurya centers on his horror at the violence necessary to build his empire and his subsequent adoption of a nonviolent spirituality. The contrast with China’s founding emperor Qin Shi Huang, whose legacy celebrates the ruthlessness necessary for the expansion and consolidation of power, could hardly be more stark. There are, of course, many counterexamples in the voluminous histories of each civilization, but it would be very difficult, overall, to argue that India’s political tradition values imperial rule to the same extent as China’s.
More recently, the Indian independence movement has further reinforced the same instinct. After centuries of British imperial rule, India’s founding leaders championed self-determination and national sovereignty. Historically a victim of foreign conquests rather than a conqueror itself, India values the international order of nation-states and continues to pursue a strategy that deeply distrusts foreign coercion. Fortunately, claims by Indian diplomats that their country is a “reformist” rather than a “revisionist” power have deep roots.
A different system
It is not enough to rely on grand civilizational abstractions to recognize that India will not exploit the international system as China has done. The structural differences between the two states virtually guarantee that India will not follow in China’s wake.
China’s weakening of international trade and institutions was a deliberate strategy that could only be executed by a highly centralized Leninist party-state. After the international backlash following the Tiananmen Square massacre, Deng Xiaoping accused Communist Party leaders of “hiding their forces and biding time” until Beijing could challenge the Bretton Woods institutions that support the U.S.-led order. Strict domestic coordination has allowed China to exploit foreign businesses and markets. When a wave of democratization swept East Asia, China resisted liberalization through a carefully orchestrated whole-of-government effort, deploying top-down state control over the media, education, the private sector, and civil society to prevent reform from taking root.
India, on the other hand, is a decentralized federal democracy. New Delhi is no closer to replicating Beijing’s top-down exploitation of international trade and institutions. India’s judicial oversight and legal barriers against industrial favoritism may be imperfect, but they nonetheless stand in stark contrast to the Chinese Communist Party’s absolute control of state-owned enterprises and the private sector. Strategic state subsidies used by Beijing to exert geopolitical leverage are simply beyond India’s reach.
The two nations also diverge in their commitment to international standards. Although India occasionally opposes intellectual property protections in sectors like pharmaceuticals, it does not engage in systemic state-sponsored espionage. campaigns or coercive joint ventures characteristic of the Chinese model. The authoritarian cynicism with which Beijing armed everything from health products to agricultural products remains foreign to Indian political tradition. And where China has sought to reshape the UN to dilute standards of democracy and human rights, India generally uses its influence to hold the organization accountable to its founding principles.
Overlearning lessons from China
The tragic irony of this moment is that by overlearning China’s lessons, Washington risks spoiling the only relationship that could help it put things right. Although China’s authoritarian system and political tradition have given it the intent and structural capacity to reverse globalization, India’s history and institutions do not portend such a threat. On the contrary, India’s rise is likely to strengthen regional and international stability, notably by limiting Chinese ambitions in the Indo-Pacific region. A stronger India means a more contested neighborhood for Beijing, a more balanced Indo-Pacific, and a more credible check on Chinese coercion on smaller states in the region.
Certainly, the era of reckless Western investment that fueled China’s rise is over, with the result that Western investments in India’s rise will have to be different. A rising wave of domestic populism, antipathy toward offshoring, and legitimate national security concerns have fundamentally altered the American and European political landscapes. These changes have far-reaching implications for India. Companies, too, are rightly hesitant to encourage “Huawei-like” competitors who could potentially compete with them through intellectual property theft or state-backed aggression.
However, supporting India’s rise remains an essential necessity to confront the problem. ladder of the challenge posed by Beijing. Washington may seek to relocate essential manufacturing, but without close collaboration with India it cannot hope to match China’s enormous production capacity, which currently triples that of the United States. Likewise, it’s hard to imagine competing with China’s fast-growing workforce in STEM fields without India, given the growing headroom that China has. overproduced American PhD students in STEM – tens of thousands every year. Nor can the United States effectively curb China’s growing influence in South Asia or elsewhere in the Global South without India’s collaboration.
By overlearning China’s lessons, Washington risks wasting the most important relationship it needs to counter China. Rubio’s trip to India should begin with this premise.