The secret sauce of the China-India rivalry is education
China’s per capita income is now more than double India’s, when their currencies are adjusted for their true purchasing power. What’s behind the divergence?
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Beijing and New Delhi pursued quite separate paths to globalization. One set its sights on becoming the world’s factory, starting with toys and electronics, and moving on to electric cars and semiconductors. The other emphasized services like computer software. Their population structures were dissimilar, too. A one-child policy gave rise to a pronounced youth bulge and brought China to the brink of rich-country status before it started turning old. India’s demographic destiny is playing out now, though minus the jobs to absorb surplus farm labor.
And then there are differences in political institutions. China’s is a single-party state, while India is a messy, multiparty, electoral democracy.
This is the conventional narrative. But what if there was a more fundamental force operating beneath the surface, a sharp departure in the long history of how the two nations embraced modern education? That’s the thesis of The Making of China and India in 21st Century, a new paper by Nitin Kumar Bharti and Li Yang. The scholars at the Paris School of Economics’ World Inequality Lab have pored over official reports and yearbooks going back to 1900 to make a database of who studied what in the two countries, for how long, and
