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25 years ago we were saying this about China and laughing at their shitty plastic exported toys. It's entirely possible that 30 years from now, your children will be sitting in your chair bitching about our industries being hollowed out by Indian companies.
It is possible though India's issues are kinda different from Japan/China in that it's not like there's been a massive war or communist effort that's rendered them a big laggard to the rest of the world. There's been no reason of that caliber why India cannot compete previously. They've been permeable to outside investment, they're not recovering from being razed to the ground and there are parts of India that are perfectly functional/developed already.
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People forget there was a time Japan had the same reputation for producing junk. Nowadays look what they’re known for. They learned from their experiences overtime. It’s possible China may do the same.
The East Asian racism was always from lower class whites, who were angry at them merely because of labour competition. The smart people have been predicting the ascent of East Asia and the possible surpassing of the West almost since first post-Renaissance contact.
India, on the other hand... the early Western explorers were like "They literally just stand there in the parade and let themselves get trampled by elephants. What the hell lmao"
There was and still is resentment toward East Asians among upper class whites, for providing a robust source of competition in knowledge work and the education credentialist system, and/or making more fashionable minority groups like blacks look bad.
There's also some geopolitics that inevitably gets mixed in with all this.
People are fuzzy thinkers and much of the overseas Chinese diaspora originates from a state whose policies and values are very much in opposition to that of The Cathedral (but that has done all too well from the 1980s onwards, and which threatens the milquetoast PMC idea that liberal-democracy-laced-with-social-justice is the ideal end state that all successful polities trend towards). For the more nationalistic, less cosmopolitan lower class, they're representatives of a state whose very existence is perceived as a threat to the Great American project, and the fear of PRC spooks just turbocharges this to a large degree.
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The ascendancy of East Asia was a problem with the timeline, not the above ground factual observations people were making of them, Japan developed after WW2. Yeah, they didn’t overtake the US as everyone was prophesying with “yenification” of the world economy back in the 70’s-90’s. China has also “ascended today,” whether that translates into a “triumph” over the west remains to be seen. Kishore Mahbubani is probably the most eminent scholar to date that makes this case but he’s been heavily assailed too.
The west doesn’t see India as a particular threat except maybe insofar as they have competing economic interests, although why the US aids Pakistan against India isn’t something I know about in great detail, except only to say we see it in our strategic interests.
US aids Pakistan because Pakistan surrendered oversight of CIA activities in the Hindu Kush listening posts entirely in exchange for having its own free hand to do its own dastardly shit, and from there the Pakistanis leveraged their place as 'useful assholes' for many players globally, a role India never managed because India saw itself too important to aid foreigners at all and so was bypassed by major powers. The Pakistanis asked for US help and offered something in return, India always said it could chart its own course while begging for aid whenever shit hit the fan (request for US carriers in 1962 war, request for USSR submarine support against the US carrier group in 1971, requests for SU30 technology transfers, requests for IMF bailouts, requests for waiver for purchasing Russian/Iranian oil, etc etc etc)
Kishores own reputation within the international commentariat is a byproduct of market demand for a non-Chinese articulate ostensibly neutral heavyweight that isn't bogged down by domestic political considerations polluting the discussion: Kishores commentary and analysis is hardly more breathtaking than informed western China observers that seem similarly dispassionate about capability convergence inevitability like basically the entire US Chamber of Commerce circa 1998-2013, or Jeffrey Sachs and Joseph Nye if you want to be intellectual about things.
However, Kishores own media ascendancy is also a byproduct of a deliberate internal tension within the Singapore foreign policy establishment where a pro-US advocate is always raised up at the same pace as an anti-US advocate, and the two actually switch positions depending on the needs of the moment. Kishores antithesis is Kausikan Bilahari, who himself enjoys some time on the media circuits when a counter to the China ascendancy is also sought. You can see the same pattern in others, there is also Chan Heng Chee and Tommy Koh, but that gets too deep into the weeds of Singapores arcane adversarial-cooption civil service modality.
Also, and lets be fucking frank here, Kishores pro-China anti-US sentiment comes from what looks like a fairly obvious chip on his shoulder. His first book was 'Can Asians Think', a direct rejoinder to a presumed racial contempt that supposedly existed in the western policy establishment which denigrated asian (specifically southeast Asian (singapore) at time of writing, but later extended to China and the subcontinent) intellectual ability and execution capacity. Thing is, even at that time of writing the US policy establishment and broadly the west as a whole recognized asian capability and its necessity to be actively managed. Kishores voluminious presence on the media circuit is downstream of what looks like obvious status reassertion, and that there is an especially receptive audience because US domestic political considerations make people cast about for an ostensible 'neutral' just happens to direct that gravy train straight to Kishores lap.
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Personally I think it's likely that China will continue to produce a lot of junk, even as the top-line quality of their manufactures grows. (Basically, this has already happened.) It's possible to find some of the highest quality goods in the world in Guangzhou and Shanghai. But if I were a random manufacturing company in Europe looking to source parts I would not trust a random Chinese factory. I suppose given time the free market would correct this, but I think China also provides some unique qualities that could allow them to keep making junk for a long time.
No doubt they will, but they’ve definitely improved in some areas. If you’re an aspiring entrepreneur in the west it makes economic sense to contact a Chinese outfit and get them to prototype a product you’ve designed. Plenty of people do it at low cost and reliably but you can also fall into traps. Word is that Vietnam is trying to make itself look very attractive to western companies by upholding their intellectual property and patent laws, and is undercutting even China as a lower cost destination for business to flourish. Not saying I’d easily trust them either, but provided you do your vetting, it makes business sense.
“Guanxi” (i.e. “connections”) is a huge concept in China and defines a lot of the activity about the way the manufacturing sector operates. Western companies are somewhat afraid to dip their toe in the water there (not that I blame them) for fear of getting burned by linking up with a bad partner. Last I read though is that’s beginning to change.
This is always proffered as a trait of Chinese culture but I'm skeptical. Connections in this respect are a feature of business everywhere, at all times. The societies that have minimized connections are all WEIRD (Haidt).
I think that "Guanxi" satisfies some deep Chinese need for everything to be catalogued and systematized. They like reifying things. It's not just who you know, it's Guanxi. It's not just networking, it's Guanxi. Likewise their penchant for Lists (Four Great Novels, The Three Principles of the People, The One Hundred Years of Humiliation, etc.). And it's fine if you can observe that it's better to win than to lose, but it helps if you can find the relevant quotation from the Art of War from Master Sun.
That’s true. I think what they mean though is that it’s often a substitute mechanism for doing business in places where institutional controls are weak or non-existent. One mistake people often make in doing business in Russia for instance is they grossly underestimate the role that informal patronage networks play in power dynamics. That isn’t just a problem in doing business there in 2026. It was one thing historians of WW2 pointed out in Hitler’s massive miscalculation to invade the Soviet Union:
“All we have to do is kick the door in and the whole rotten structure will come tumbling down.”
The exact opposite of that happened and people ran into the arms of “Papa” Stalin, even as he was brutally oppressing them. Look at China throughout the ages as you just did but with a bit of an adjustment. The Tang Dynasty was established by the Li family, which came from a military aristocracy in the northwest of China, and it was ruled from there on out by noble families (guanxi and patronage networks). In the west we neither have a history nor a system like that. If you want you could say “merit” and social recognition in a basic sense play a role and sometimes even a strong role, but it’s not like it is in the rest of the world.
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The difference is that the Indian government isn’t powerful enough to make the decisions the Chinese government has either made or didn’t need to (because communism effectively reset property rules and forcibly collectivized smallholders).
India can’t modernize until it deals with agricultural subsidies and inefficient farming which essentially leave vast sections of rural India under a form of quasi-feudal quasi-socialist economic relations. Even Modi wasn’t powerful enough to slightly change this, revolts forced him to back down when he tried.
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