RisingShiningSuperpower
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It's sad to see such defeatist attitude from the author. I understand India is behind China, but Modi-ji is a visionary leader who will propel India to greater heights. I have no doubt that India will quickly surpass China to become a superpower by 2020!
Why China can’t be limited to its economic success - Livemint
Why China can’t be limited to its economic success
Hard to imagine today, but the Chinese thought India was the gold standard for civilization 1,500 years ago. Fa-Hien and the other travellers during 400-518 AD came to India for authentic texts because Buddhism had become corrupted in China. It needed infusion from India. There is a huge temple and statue in Xi’an dedicated to Hiuen Tsang for this achievement. But there was more.
At Dengfeng, on this current trip to China, I saw dozens of martial arts schools (with tens of thousands of full-time students) and the Shaolin temple.
Shaolin’s kung fu founder, whose large statue is placed next to the Buddha’s, is a bearded Indian man called Bodhidharma.
The story is that in the sixth century or thereabouts he went, for whatever reason, from India to the mountains just behind the temple. Here he found peace and began to meditate in solitude. He studied animal movements and developed the various styles of kung fu and founded Shaolin kung fu. And so, the Chinese martial art of kung fu, according to the Chinese themselves, is of Indian origin.
To me this sounds bogus. What aspect of Indian culture is as physical as kung fu (please don’t say kalaripayattu). How can such dynamic movements spring from a culture such as ours?
No, it is more likely that a mythical Bodhidharma was credited because of the Buddha.
The fragrance of that very great man’s message perfumed everything Indian. And all good things in China, particularly if they were to be spread, would have carried a “Made in India” stamp to be authentic. In that period, India was the Chinese Mecca. As I said, hard to imagine.
As we might expect, this Chinese reverence for our motherland did not survive an actual encounter with India. And thus describing some South Asian city: “They have no written character. Their rules of politeness are very defective. They have no knowledge at all of the movements of the heavenly bodies...” (from the book The Mission Of Hwui Seng And Sung Yun In 518 AD).
Some of the travellers’ material will appal both my fellow Hindutvawadis and liberals:
“The king in the administration of justice, inflicts no corporal punishment but each culprit is fined in money according to the gravity of his offence...the people do not kill any living creature, nor drink intoxicating liquor, nor eat onions or garlic. The only exception is that of the Chandalas. That is the name for those who are (held to be) wicked men, and live apart from others.” (from the book Records Of Buddhist Countries Chi Fah Hian Of The Sung Dynasty–400 AD).
Temples in China have massive daily collections. There are glass boxes and wooden receptacles and bursting full sacks and even open trays heaped with cash standing unguarded. I do not want to be overly cruel but on the same day, 10 June, that I went to the Lama or Yonghe Temple in Beijing, the Hindustan Times ran a report headlined: “In Kerala’s Sabarimala temple, robots to man God’s wealth”. The story said the temple administration was bringing machines to count money because it did not trust its pilfering employees.
I said in my last column that like us the Chinese have a transactional relationship with God (“Lord, take this money, and give me stuff”). But I noticed that the Chinese only pray before they pay and never afterwards. Unlike us, who send a couple of bows after as well (just to make sure), they stuff the cash into the box at the end and then take off. Does this mean the Chinese trust God more than we do? Perhaps.
Temples give away one incense box to each individual free and devotees are instructed to light no more than three sticks. This is to prevent pollution. The incense sticks have been reduced in length and thickness and one temple carried the sign: “No incense burning on windy or smoggy days”.
The Chinese are serious about controlling pollution and I have seen more electric bikes (thousands of them everywhere) and little electric wagons there than I have seen anywhere else in the world. It indicates a bureaucracy that can penetrate into society and affect the changes it seeks.
Civil service examinations in China began from the Sui dynasty, a thousand years ago, much before they did in Europe.
A Confucian temple and imperial university in Beijing, built in 1302 to educate and examine the candidates, are still preserved, showing the tradition.
The Chinese had the same entrance-exam system with minor modifications for a millennium ending in 1911. Anti-cheating laws, for instance, came in the Song dynasty (from 960-1279).
It is true that the system was rigid, and rewarded regurgitation instead of free thinking. And it was corrupt and monopolized by bureaucratic families.
But it also means that there was a route for Chinese plebeians up a merit-based system for a long, long time, producing a middle class when we had none. That is why the universal synonym for bureaucrat is mandarin and not babu.
The idea of a civil-service exam only came to the West after a Frenchman called Bouret lifted it from China.
I bought a little statuette of the man who inspired the curriculum that the bureaucrats were taught, whose name is Latinized as Confucius, to add to my small (but growing) collection of busts and figurines of philosophers, tyrants and leaders. In it Confucius is shown in idealized form (old man in saintly robes) rather than realistic.
Chinese statuary is not particularly good. Meaning that it is not anthropomorphic but fantastic. Like ours.
I must turn here to the subject of my favourite people: Gujaratis. Our guides were amazed to see Indians who ate whatever was on offer. Most of them confessed they had only ever encountered desi groups that were large (30 people), with mostly non-English speakers and accompanied by a maharaj (Gujarati cook). One group, an incredulous guide said, even brought along a doctor (most likely US Patels).
It is painful for me to admit but I must confess that it is hard to find a more parochial, closed-minded lot than mine.
I need hardly go into the rigidity of upper-caste Indian diet. The world knows “vegetarian”. There is no such word as “non-vegetarian” outside lndia, as my wife points out. Most Gujarati descriptions of their China vacation will begin with a whine of how tough it was to eat. That’s because of the polluting aspect of meat. The idea that food needs to be pure, something upper-caste Hinduism shares with the Semitic faith it despises.
But for me the time the Gujarati gene really shone was in Xi’an, whose Terracotta Army the world’s greatest Gujarati famously visited recently. Only around 1,500 of about 8,000 statues have so far been excavated and glued back together. Because of this, one Indian group harangued the guide over why they were made to pay for 9,000 warriors when they could see only 1,000. I can guarantee that was a Gujarati group.
Entrance tickets to most Chinese places is Rs.1,000 a head and often more. But, unlike India, it is not discriminatory. Foreigners and Chinese pay the same amount.
I wanted to talk about the one-child policy and Chinese English names and the Chinese Buddha’s facial features and rotundity here. But there is no more space for all of that.
To me China is too enormous and too fascinating to be limited to just its economic success. But let me end by coming to that subject.
Minxin Pei, The Indian Express columnist, wrote this four years ago: “In 2001, the Chinese GDP was $1.16 trillion based on the exchange rate at that time; by 2010, it had expanded four times to $6.04 trillion. In the same decade, Chinese foreign trade grew six times, from $500 billion to $3 trillion. Its foreign exchange reserves rose from $212 billion in 2001 to $3.2 trillion in July 2011.”
Today, of course, the numbers are even stronger. China’s GDP is today more than $10 trillion (around Rs.640 trillion), while India’s is more than $2 trillion. So there it is then. By this measure, China is only around a decade ahead of us.
Will we do as they did and arrive in 2025 where they are today? How I wish my bookmaker would offer the odds. And I wonder, given how much their ancestors revered us, if the Chinese think we will make it.
Read Aakar Patel’s previous Lounge columns here.
Why China can’t be limited to its economic success - Livemint
Why China can’t be limited to its economic success
Hard to imagine today, but the Chinese thought India was the gold standard for civilization 1,500 years ago. Fa-Hien and the other travellers during 400-518 AD came to India for authentic texts because Buddhism had become corrupted in China. It needed infusion from India. There is a huge temple and statue in Xi’an dedicated to Hiuen Tsang for this achievement. But there was more.
At Dengfeng, on this current trip to China, I saw dozens of martial arts schools (with tens of thousands of full-time students) and the Shaolin temple.
Shaolin’s kung fu founder, whose large statue is placed next to the Buddha’s, is a bearded Indian man called Bodhidharma.
The story is that in the sixth century or thereabouts he went, for whatever reason, from India to the mountains just behind the temple. Here he found peace and began to meditate in solitude. He studied animal movements and developed the various styles of kung fu and founded Shaolin kung fu. And so, the Chinese martial art of kung fu, according to the Chinese themselves, is of Indian origin.
To me this sounds bogus. What aspect of Indian culture is as physical as kung fu (please don’t say kalaripayattu). How can such dynamic movements spring from a culture such as ours?
No, it is more likely that a mythical Bodhidharma was credited because of the Buddha.
The fragrance of that very great man’s message perfumed everything Indian. And all good things in China, particularly if they were to be spread, would have carried a “Made in India” stamp to be authentic. In that period, India was the Chinese Mecca. As I said, hard to imagine.
As we might expect, this Chinese reverence for our motherland did not survive an actual encounter with India. And thus describing some South Asian city: “They have no written character. Their rules of politeness are very defective. They have no knowledge at all of the movements of the heavenly bodies...” (from the book The Mission Of Hwui Seng And Sung Yun In 518 AD).
Some of the travellers’ material will appal both my fellow Hindutvawadis and liberals:
“The king in the administration of justice, inflicts no corporal punishment but each culprit is fined in money according to the gravity of his offence...the people do not kill any living creature, nor drink intoxicating liquor, nor eat onions or garlic. The only exception is that of the Chandalas. That is the name for those who are (held to be) wicked men, and live apart from others.” (from the book Records Of Buddhist Countries Chi Fah Hian Of The Sung Dynasty–400 AD).
Temples in China have massive daily collections. There are glass boxes and wooden receptacles and bursting full sacks and even open trays heaped with cash standing unguarded. I do not want to be overly cruel but on the same day, 10 June, that I went to the Lama or Yonghe Temple in Beijing, the Hindustan Times ran a report headlined: “In Kerala’s Sabarimala temple, robots to man God’s wealth”. The story said the temple administration was bringing machines to count money because it did not trust its pilfering employees.
I said in my last column that like us the Chinese have a transactional relationship with God (“Lord, take this money, and give me stuff”). But I noticed that the Chinese only pray before they pay and never afterwards. Unlike us, who send a couple of bows after as well (just to make sure), they stuff the cash into the box at the end and then take off. Does this mean the Chinese trust God more than we do? Perhaps.
Temples give away one incense box to each individual free and devotees are instructed to light no more than three sticks. This is to prevent pollution. The incense sticks have been reduced in length and thickness and one temple carried the sign: “No incense burning on windy or smoggy days”.
The Chinese are serious about controlling pollution and I have seen more electric bikes (thousands of them everywhere) and little electric wagons there than I have seen anywhere else in the world. It indicates a bureaucracy that can penetrate into society and affect the changes it seeks.
Civil service examinations in China began from the Sui dynasty, a thousand years ago, much before they did in Europe.
A Confucian temple and imperial university in Beijing, built in 1302 to educate and examine the candidates, are still preserved, showing the tradition.
The Chinese had the same entrance-exam system with minor modifications for a millennium ending in 1911. Anti-cheating laws, for instance, came in the Song dynasty (from 960-1279).
It is true that the system was rigid, and rewarded regurgitation instead of free thinking. And it was corrupt and monopolized by bureaucratic families.
But it also means that there was a route for Chinese plebeians up a merit-based system for a long, long time, producing a middle class when we had none. That is why the universal synonym for bureaucrat is mandarin and not babu.
The idea of a civil-service exam only came to the West after a Frenchman called Bouret lifted it from China.
I bought a little statuette of the man who inspired the curriculum that the bureaucrats were taught, whose name is Latinized as Confucius, to add to my small (but growing) collection of busts and figurines of philosophers, tyrants and leaders. In it Confucius is shown in idealized form (old man in saintly robes) rather than realistic.
Chinese statuary is not particularly good. Meaning that it is not anthropomorphic but fantastic. Like ours.
I must turn here to the subject of my favourite people: Gujaratis. Our guides were amazed to see Indians who ate whatever was on offer. Most of them confessed they had only ever encountered desi groups that were large (30 people), with mostly non-English speakers and accompanied by a maharaj (Gujarati cook). One group, an incredulous guide said, even brought along a doctor (most likely US Patels).
It is painful for me to admit but I must confess that it is hard to find a more parochial, closed-minded lot than mine.
I need hardly go into the rigidity of upper-caste Indian diet. The world knows “vegetarian”. There is no such word as “non-vegetarian” outside lndia, as my wife points out. Most Gujarati descriptions of their China vacation will begin with a whine of how tough it was to eat. That’s because of the polluting aspect of meat. The idea that food needs to be pure, something upper-caste Hinduism shares with the Semitic faith it despises.
But for me the time the Gujarati gene really shone was in Xi’an, whose Terracotta Army the world’s greatest Gujarati famously visited recently. Only around 1,500 of about 8,000 statues have so far been excavated and glued back together. Because of this, one Indian group harangued the guide over why they were made to pay for 9,000 warriors when they could see only 1,000. I can guarantee that was a Gujarati group.
Entrance tickets to most Chinese places is Rs.1,000 a head and often more. But, unlike India, it is not discriminatory. Foreigners and Chinese pay the same amount.
I wanted to talk about the one-child policy and Chinese English names and the Chinese Buddha’s facial features and rotundity here. But there is no more space for all of that.
To me China is too enormous and too fascinating to be limited to just its economic success. But let me end by coming to that subject.
Minxin Pei, The Indian Express columnist, wrote this four years ago: “In 2001, the Chinese GDP was $1.16 trillion based on the exchange rate at that time; by 2010, it had expanded four times to $6.04 trillion. In the same decade, Chinese foreign trade grew six times, from $500 billion to $3 trillion. Its foreign exchange reserves rose from $212 billion in 2001 to $3.2 trillion in July 2011.”
Today, of course, the numbers are even stronger. China’s GDP is today more than $10 trillion (around Rs.640 trillion), while India’s is more than $2 trillion. So there it is then. By this measure, China is only around a decade ahead of us.
Will we do as they did and arrive in 2025 where they are today? How I wish my bookmaker would offer the odds. And I wonder, given how much their ancestors revered us, if the Chinese think we will make it.
Read Aakar Patel’s previous Lounge columns here.
