No matter how much you downplay and deride China's accomplishments, you have to admit that they have done better than India so far, by a wide margin.
Hardly wide.
Any sensible person will evaluate Tejas to be atleast generation ahead of J-10.
China inital "faster" advances in nuclear and missile technologies were entirely dependent on Soviet tech transfers, which continued till as long at 1960 !!.
And just after about 11 years of "loneliness", China became a client state of USA in 1971 (Nixon).
Compare the years 1949-1960 and 1971-2004 (Nixon era / Clinton era) when China enjoyed overwhelming superpower patronage compared to India ... which are entirely non-aligned and
on her own.
USA and rest of the west had herculean tech sanctions against India, which during all times were harder than what applied to China. Okay.. in 1989, arms embargo was there .. but
even post 1989-era there was no tech sanctions. (India had these because India didn't sign NPT).
In fact, Clinton amply gave freedoms to china, which were inconceivable for India till as long as the "Indo-US nuclear deal" was closed in 2008.. and only very recently Bush / Obama lifted most of the tech sanctions.
And then compare the key client states of US - Japan, South Korea and Taiwan ... completely free of tech transfer sanctions for electronics and nuclear technology .. (you can find how many nuclear power plants South Korea and Japan have; and electronics manufacturing in Taiwan) .... combined tech transfer of all these went to help china, not India .... in the Clinton era, when these client states moved some manufacturing / assembly processes to china.
Now, assess if India has done a poor job? (yes, its always good to give hard criticism to ourselves, because that's the key to improvement and overperformance).
I will well receive criticism which say that DRDO, ISRO, HAL, ADA, Tatas, L&T, Micromax and Karbonn could have done much better ... but its not wise to compare their achievements to China's (especially, as if they have underperformed).
If compared to china, they all won .. and china could not use even all those advantages to have achievements which could be termed a "
wide margin".
Yes they were one of the biggest military importers, but that is because they are one of the largest militaries, just like India. But check out what percentage of their hardware is produced domestically, and what percentage is purchased from abroad. And then check the same stats for India.
Well, India could easily produce 200 or 300 Tejas .. but it didn't and wisely. The strategy has to be optimised to give us cheapest most effective defence. If we didn't have 200+ Su-30MKIs probably you would already be seeing 200 or 300 Tejas in IAF. But, by current standards of IAF, we have the time and patience to perfect it further, before mass producing.
Do you know, J-10 isn't being produced anymore .. the sick plane of the earlier generation isn't needed by PLAAF either?
Their next step is to develop a plane with composites.. which Tejas already is.
And coming to electronics, open any consumer goods, and see how many "made in china" labels you see, and how many "made in India" ones. Even if they are only assembling stuff (which is not true anymore, the have moved up in the value chain), that is still a lot of money spent within the country, enriching their workers. Micromax and Karbonn are not in the same league as Huawei.
"made in china" by whom? -- by phillips, by apple, by nec.
and why? -- because china burns 50% of the world's coal, and is more than willing to sell steel at a price less than iron-ore.
they are, indeed "digging" and "digging" and willing to sell the "dig" cheap.
If you take out the mineral production of china (which is counted as a part of their "industrial gdp"), it becomes similar to India's.
And with the "mineral production" gdp structure of china resembles more like Saudi Arabia, than like India.
List of countries by GDP sector composition - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Industrial GDP:
Saudi Arabia: 66.9%
UAE: 59.4%
Indonesia: 46.9%
China: 45.3%
These are the top four countries by highest percentage of GDP coming via industrial sector (check out the link above).
Take out the mineral production .. (sensible persons won't count "mineral production" as industrial) !... and the story changes completely.
Yes, Chinese products may not be as sophisticated or cutting edge as European ones. A J-10 may not be as good as a rafale.
Off course, it isn't.
The question is, do you think it is better than Tejas?
Or the chinese are yet to produce their Tejas-equivalent.
But whatever their industries churn out is not something ours can match in the near future, quantitatively or qualitatively. We have to pay hard earned money to Europeans to maintain the balance of power, and purchase stuff that are four times more expensive, with all that money going out of the country.
We don't. Rafale isn't need to counter a "J-10" off course.
Its the technology which we really want to buy.
We learnt a lot from Su-30MKI (parts of electronics were developed by India) .. and those parts are even being exported to Russia !!
Western technologies are better than Russians in many ways ... if it's cheaper to buy them, rather than re-invent the wheels (.. those wheels which will be costlier to re-invent than import), it sure makes sense to buy them.
China off course, doesn't have that option (apart from Russia, which may offer them something) ... and
this is the first period ever (ever since Bush opened up to us, since the nuclear deal), that India has better access to leapfrog technologies as its
less-sanctioned now compared to china.
