ABSTRACT
A comparative study of Indian and Chinese development strategies and achievements is of obvious interest to all those who are concerned about Third World development problems. India and China achieved effective political independence from imperialism and started planned economic growth at about the same time, though under very different socio-political systems. Both were poor, populous, with long traditions of artisan skills but little modern industry, still primarily rural and agrarian in terms of employment, and both were characterised by a high degree of concentration of land ownership deriving from a long history of pre-capitalist landed property. Important differences and dissimilarities lay in the social structure (the absence of caste in China and greater ethnic-linguistic cohesiveness than in India), and in the more profound impact of two centuries of direct colonisation in India compared to a century of semi-colonial status in China. Nevertheless, there seem to be enough similarities in the initial conditions, despite all the differences, to make a meaningful comparison of the two countries’ strategies of development. The relative performance of the two economies could in turn be interpreted as a test of the efficacy of the vastly differing strategies followed in the two countries with regard to economic growth and distributive egalitarianism.
