Indian business leader: China not India's competitor
- By Zhang Rui
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E-mail China.org.cn, October 21, 2014
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R. Gopalakrishnan speaks at a seminar organized by the Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies at Renmin University of China in Beijing, Oct. 16, 2014. [China.org.cn] |
A veteran business leader said at a seminar in Beijing on Friday that China and India should work as collaborators to change the world.
R. Gopalakrishnan, who has been a professional manager with Unilever for 31 years and with Tata for 15 years, is now a director of Tata Sons, chairman of Tata AutoComp Systems and Rallis India, and the vice chairman of Tata Chemicals. He also serves on the boards of Tata Power, Tata Technologies, Akzo Nobel India and BP Castrol India.
"I don't see China as competitor to India," he said at a forum entitled "The rise of India and the future of Sino-Indian relations," organized by the Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies at Renmin University of China. "I see it as a collaborator to India. Now in order to make the India-China act work better so they reassume their predominant positions…It will be a remarkably huge event. Not because you are gaining somebody else as friends, but because 35 percent or 40 percent of humans on the planet have changed," Gopalakrishnan explained.
There have been quite a few ups and downs in the developments of Sino-Indian relations in the past few decades, but much has changed in recent years. Chinese President Xi Jinping concluded his September tour of South Asia with a two-day state visit to India which appears to have been successful and promising.
As guest speaker Professor Liu Zhiqin said at Friday's forum, "India and China have never become real friends, not really enemies either. It's very close geographically, but from the heart they are far away. India is very familiar to Chinese but also very strange to Chinese."
"China and India were the predominant economies in the world," R. Gopalakrishnan said, "But by the end of the Second World War, 1944-45, the position of India and China had changed dramatically. Neither of them was counted in world affairs. India was coming out of a colonial background, and China was in the midst of great potential transformation at that time. And what we used to contribute to the world economy – 30, 40, 45 percent of the world GDP – had shrunk to almost a single digit. We are now looking at the next, I'm not talking about 5 years or 10 years, I'm talking about 50 years. What could the world look like?"
He continued, "There are political differences, there are social differences, there are economic differences, there are historical differences. The idea is that throughout our history China and India have never worked together for whatever reason, with the exception of Buddhism coming to China which was 2,000 years ago. But if you look at similarities between India and China, we know what there are. They have both got large populations, which are waiting to be uplifted in their economic well-being. We both have a culture, doesn't matter whether you think it's good or bad, of being very deferential to elders or to our ancestors. I think it's a good culture, though sometimes we think our younger generation's not paying that much attention to that aspect. But generally speaking, Chinese society and Indian society have that similarity. We have a strong middle class emerging. "
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Professor John Ross speaks at a seminar organized by the Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies at Renmin University of China in Beijing, Oct. 16, 2014. [China.org.cn] |
Professor John Ross, another guest speaker, said at the seminar, "Unfortunately as in many countries the popular press has played a mischievous role because they write rather stupid things about China that China has the plots to seize the Himalayas or advance into India and seize large parts of territories, etc. Unfortunately these rather stupid statements get taken up by Chinese press, and in fact, I wrote an article to explain that India is not against China, India is not against the United States, India is for India. "
He quoted a sentence from his article published on the Economic Times, "'India and China, without ambiguity, are the economies which have come most strongly through the financial crisis.' The reality is that both India and China have the greatest economical strength, but it's not so well known whether they have the greatest potential for longer term economic growth and for macroeconomic stability."
R. Gopalakrishnan pointed out that India is playing very hard on trade policy. "China is exactly the opposite. Now this morning, I was talking to Ambassador Charlene Barshefsky, the former United States trade representative who negotiated the WTO with China, and I asked a question about what it takes to be a trade negotiator. And she said to me, 'I wonder why India negotiates with saying "I win, full stop" in trade matters. But China negotiates with "I win but you also win." So you have very different styles and methods in negotiation." So it's deep in our psyche that if you are liberal about trade, somebody may take you over because it happened before. Even when I look at China, it's quite the other way around. "
But R. Gopalakrishnan also asserted that it's very complicated for an Indian to do business in China, saying, "So once you start to understand that the difficulty is not one way but two ways, together we can do things that no two nations have ever cooperated on in the history of mankind."
He added, "For the first time in Asia after the Second World War, simultaneously you have strong leaders in China and we have strong leaders in India, such as Mr. Narendra Modi. They have a strong leader in Indonesia after their dramatic election. And given the Japanese situation, they have the strong leader Mr. Abe. So you have China, India, Japan and Indonesia which are counting for half of the world's population. For the first time all four of them have strong leaders. I cannot make any guarantees, but I can see there are good chances. It's like saying within a small team, we have good players but the team has to work still. How to make the team work is a great challenge for international diplomacy and economic planning. And it's my hope as a common citizen, not a diplomat nor a think tank, if these four nations can provide strong leadership to people, and do something that's unprecedented in the world, it will excite me. "
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