By Shyam Saran, Former Foreign Secretary of India

Despite the fact that China is the most important current challenge for India and is likely to remain so for the foreseeable future, there is a surprising lack of well-researched Indian scholarly material on the country, its history and culture, the temperament of its people and the drivers of the remarkable transformation that has taken place in the country in its frenetic dash to modernity over the past four decades. There is a plethora of writings on Chinese foreign policy and its security orientation, but these lack depth because the overall context of the country’s history and culture and the nature of its polity, is missing. What Shastri Ramachandaran has achieved through his collection of writings between 2008 and 2022-Beyond Binaries: The World of India and China-is to offer a uniquely Indian perspective on China in its different dimensions and relating these to his own deep familiarity with the no less impressive changes that have taken place in India during the same period. I purposely use the phrase China “challenge” rather than the phrase China “threat”, because there is much that India may learn from the Chinese experience in charting its own development trajectory, avoiding its mistakes but benefiting from its notable successes. Despite the current tensions in the India-China relationship, the author keeps his focus on the opportunities which exist for the two countries to collaborate in a number of mutually beneficial ways. Chinese capital and its construction technologies and management methods could turbo-charge India’s own quest for world-class infrastructure. The scale of the market India offers, and a scale that is rapidly expanding, could be a significant opportunity for Chinese companies. The author has done well to draw attention to this brighter side of the India-China story.

I found the author’s recounting of his experiences working in Chinese media some of the more interesting parts of the book. He presents a much more nuanced, a much more varied picture of China, one that tempers the image of a monolith that is current today. This is a diverse country and behind the uniformity that its Leninist state aspires to, the Chinese people often refuse to fall in line, even if they pretend to.

There are few comparative studies of India and China, despite the obvious parallelisms. They are the two most populous countries in the world and their economic weight is still expanding. China is the second-largest economy in the world, India is already the fifth-largest and projected to reach the status of being the third largest fairly soon. How their relationship evolves over the coming years is important not only for the two countries but for the rest of the world. Shastri Ramachandaran must be complimented for offering a deeper and more balanced perspective on how their respective quests for modernity is changing their societies, the aspirations of their people and the world view of their leaders. These are civilisational states and history and tradition continue to provide the prism through which they perceive and interact with the world around them, shaping it in ways that are not yet clear. Thanks to the author we have a clearer picture of the emerging contours. This is a book that provides valuable inputs into policy analysis and policy making.

(This article is the Foreword to Shastri Ramachandaran’s book, Beyond Binaries: The World of India and China, published by Institute of Objective Studies, New Delhi. January 2024).