In the 20th century, China and India were largely seen as demographic behemoths but economic weaklings. Home, collectively, to some one third of humanity, both struggled with feeding and housing their populations and with entering the industrial age. That entrance was a long time coming, and both countries are still wrestling with issues of poverty and the growing pains inherent in industrialization.
Peering forward into the rapidly unfolding 21st century, however, both Americans and Europeans now have reason to wonder if the challenge of the coming years will be not how the advanced industrialized countries will contend with the poverty of these Asian giants, but whether or not, and how soon, China and India will come to be economically dominant players on the world stage. Already, China is commonly referred to as "the world's manufacturing platform." India, meanwhile, has become a hot spot for high tech outsourcing, from software development and call centers to the digital transmission of medical images read by lower-paid Indian radiologists and beamed back to hospitals in Europe and the United States.
One of the primary points Jairam Ramesh emphasizes in his new collection of previously published columns, Making Sense of Chindia: Reflections on China and India (India Research Press) is that the "rise" of these countries, in many ways, should be understood less as a new development and more as a re-emergence. "At the beginning of the 18th century," he writes, "China and India certainly dominated the world and not just demographically." This statement precedes a chart which compares the distribution of world income, on a percentage basis, based on purchasing power parity. The chart, which divides the world into China, India, Europe, the United States, Japan, and Russia, looks at the years 1700, 1820, 1890, 1952, 1978, and 1995. Its figures are drawn from Chinese Economic Performance in the Long Run, a 1998 publication from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
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