India and China are neighbours — each with a billion-plus population, together accounting for 38 per cent of the world’s population, with the fastest GDP growth rates for large economies, with China already (in PPP terms) the world’s second largest economy and India set to become the third largest in the intermediate future. How the two big neighbours bond together in the future is crucial for global order. Further, how they interact with the United States will determine the international trends of the foreseeable future.
For at least two millennia, and until about 300 years ago, these two countries were considered by the then prevailing criteria as the most developed in the world, accounting for about 50 per cent of the world’s GDP. However, owing to similar experiences with foreign aggression, imperialism, and internal orthodoxy, India and China underwent a two-century long decline whereby by the mid-20th century, they became the world’s poorest nations.
Despite being neighbours and having flourishing economies over centuries, the two nations until 1962 neither ever went to war, nor took advantage of local civil wars. This is a most extraordinary and unparalleled experience of neighbourly peace in world civilisational history. Contrast this with what happened in Europe, West Asia, and North Africa.
The two peoples traded goods, exchanged visitors, borrowed ideas, and generally respected each other at the ruler and ruled levels — until foreign invasions and imperialism cut off normal interactions and relations became frozen. They were revived only in 1950, but fizzled out by 1959. War followed in 1962, for the first time in millennia.
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