In the mid-19th century Karl Marx claimed that European colonizers, though corrupt and violent, were the "unconscious tool of history" that would propel India and China into modernity. He described the backward "Asiatic mode of production," defined by the absence of private ownership and the presence of a rigid, centralized form of government that prevents change and modernization.
Such views prompted Edward Said to denounce Marx as an orientalist who had subsumed India and China into a narrative of human progress designed by and for Europeans. But nothing Marx said about Asia would ever be as influential or widely disseminated as the recent idea in the West that free-market capitalism has finally awakened India and China from their long Asiatic slumber.
If the rise of India and China seems dramatic, it is because not so long ago India appeared in the Western imagination as a poor, backward and often violent nation. With its needy millions and Luddite communist regime, China seemed sunk even deeper into darkness.
Now, abruptly, we are told that India and China are economic giants, driving world growth by converging on the European model of modernity. Francis Fukuyama first outlined this post-Cold War ideology of globalization by claiming in his 1992 book, The End of History, that Western liberal democracy, based on private property, free markets and regular elections, was the terminus of historical development. Consecrated annually in Davos and circulated in business-class lounges around the world, this quasi-teleological view increasingly shapes the beliefs and policies of Western political, business and media elites.
unfettered capitalism
The attempt to explain -- and change -- the world by exalting the apparently unique Western virtues of free-market capitalism and democracy may seem to have run into problems lately. Failed experiments with unfettered capitalism have helped install authoritarian right wing and populist left wing regimes in Russia and Latin America, respectively. The recent irruptions of radical Islam, and the war in Iraq, have muddied further the image of a world rushing to embrace victorious Western values.
Nevertheless, the abrupt rise of the two biggest countries of the orient reaffirms the faith expressed eloquently by the American columnist Thomas Friedman that globalizing free-market capitalism and democracy will enable much of the world's population to reach the summit of material plenitude, political stability and social security, where Western societies apparently reside.
It would be nice to imagine the spirit of altruism behind this generous desire to share the West's good fortune. But today China offers Western corporations a tempting market of more than a billion customers and a seemingly endless source of cheap labor, as does India.
Indian and Chinese elites borrow no less eagerly than their Western counterparts from the discourse of neo-orientalism as they attribute India and China's recent economic growth to the free markets they embraced in the 1980s and 1990s. But even a casual glance at their claims will reveal them to be caricatures of a complex political and economic reality.
India registered its most impressive gains from 1951 to 1980, after emerging from more than two centuries of systematic colonial exploitation, during which it was, in effect, deindustrialized. Until 1980 India achieved an average annual economic growth of 3.5 percent -- as much as most countries achieved. In this period India's much derided socialistic economy also helped create the country's industrial capacity.
RSS