• Tankiedesantski [he/him]@hexbear.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    45
    ·
    11 months ago

    England certainly didn’t help, but…

    Understatement of the century.

    It’s interesting to compare India and China since both have huge populations and gained independence at the same time. Personally, I really do think it comes down to governance and central planning, where the dictatorship of the proletariat and central planning is more suitable to developing a large semi-feudal state than liberal democratic squabbling.

    • usernamesaredifficul [he/him]@hexbear.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      42
      ·
      11 months ago

      Literacy programs. Mao’s literacy programs meant that the Chinese peasantry were able to take on new roles in a developing nation. It’s not that everyone in China went on to become a brain surgeon but the ability to recieve and obey written instructions makes people far more productive

      India’s caste system means there was never as much interest in making some people literate and the country paid for that. There are parts of India that were ran by Maoists at the time of Mao’s literacy programs and they are considerably better off

    • Mardoniush [she/her]@hexbear.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      29
      ·
      11 months ago

      In some ways yes, but China managing to hold on to nominal independence and partially modernise in the late 19th century/early 20th century helped, compared to India which was forcibly de-industrialised. Having all your machines carted to England and your skilled tradesmen and artisans reduced to serfdom for 150 years is a hell of a setback. One that even the chaos of the Opium Wars, Collapse, and the Warlord era can’t quite match.

      China murdering the landowners rather than paying them off also helped.

      • Saeculum [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        12
        ·
        11 months ago

        Not sure if the colonial occupation of India is quite comparable to the carnage China saw in the first half of the 20th century. The boxer Rebellion, three revolutions, the warlord era and Japanese genocide during WWII and then the violence of the civil war afterwards.

        India had repeated famines sure, but I don’t really think you can argue they were worse off than China at the time of independence.

        • Mardoniush [she/her]@hexbear.net
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          2
          ·
          11 months ago

          The chaos of 19th and early 20th century China was utterly horrific, but there’s a difference between wild chaos that destroys, co opts, or forces capital and labour to lie fallow, and the systematic, planned, comprehensive dismatling of that capability over an entire nation for more than a century.

          Which the British did in India, they deliberately reduced a nation with an early industrial revolution economy back to pre industry and further, to pure agrarianism.

          To openly be a skilled textile worker in 1850s India was about as safe as being a Cathar in medieval France.

      • zifnab25 [he/him, any]@hexbear.net
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        7
        ·
        11 months ago

        China murdering the landowners rather than paying them off also helped.

        No shortage of dead landlords in India, depending on when and where you were standing. But the Mao/Deng/Hu/Xi era has cultivated a very different kind of domestic self-sufficiency than the modern Modi state that simply exists to serve Western interests.

      • Dolores [love/loves]@hexbear.net
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        6
        ·
        11 months ago

        partially modernise in the late 19th century/early 20th century

        i’d say the level of ‘modernization’ in China would’ve been a rough parity or even less than India overall. in both cases most the rail was built to serve imperial interests, like the most developed system in Manchuria—but China had 27k km of lines in 1945 vs. probably a bit less than 77k in india (when they reorganized it in 1951, can’t find earlier overall figures). i’d say most of the progress from the late Qing was more-or-less erased in the warlord era & japanese invasion

        i mean it was to the point colonial-developed Manchuria is seen as a big advantage for the Communists to acquire (which btw the Soviets didn’t “hand over”, i don’t know who started that myth the GMT occupied most of it but lost it in early fighting)

        • Mardoniush [she/her]@hexbear.net
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          3
          ·
          11 months ago

          My point is that unlike China, India was “deindustrialised” over the 19th century from a fairly advanced 18th century economy.

          They had approx same amounts of 19th century tech, sure, but China still had a large base of skilled artisans that could bootstrap internal development of production, while India had a much more vestigial capacity.

          • Dolores [love/loves]@hexbear.net
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            2
            ·
            11 months ago

            China still had a large base of skilled artisans that could bootstrap internal development of production

            did they though? China wasn’t industrialized yet but forcibly opened up as a market for western goods. their attempts at building a domestic industrial base were disrupted by the warlords & japan. i don’t think there was a nucleic handicraft economy waiting to develop into an industrial one, at least not outside of the most remote places which factory products had never reached.

  • President_Obama [they/them]@hexbear.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    25
    ·
    edit-2
    11 months ago

    interior factors

    If they say it’s not a systemic cause, an external cause, they’re being racist. Because the only option left is “internal”, there being something inherently wrong with the group of people they’re talking about.

    • zifnab25 [he/him, any]@hexbear.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      26
      ·
      11 months ago

      I’m just so tired of hearing how every corner of the earth in some kind of abnormally high crime wave.

      India’s in a crime wave. London is in a crime wave. Peoria, Illinois is in a crime wave. I am once again begging to live in the world these people think we live in, where everyone has an utter contempt for civil law and they’re all doing crimes all the time with impunity.

  • GarfieldYaoi [he/him]@hexbear.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    19
    ·
    11 months ago

    “Indoctrinated by Modi”

    Don’t you idiots cheer on Modi? Or do you deep down realize that you’re the real savages when you see non-whites sometimes act like you?

  • GarbageShoot [he/him]@hexbear.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    17
    ·
    11 months ago

    I mean, Modi isn’t helping, but it’s not like he cast a spell on the population to make so many of them Hindu Nationalists, or is singularly a bigger influence than colonization was.

    • Dolores [love/loves]@hexbear.net
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      9
      ·
      11 months ago

      1 politician significant for the past ~20 years or the traumatic destruction of a country arbitrarily divided into three by the British as punishment for independence, i wonder what could have greater consequences for nationalist movements on the indian subcontinent

  • Awoo [she/her]@hexbear.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    14
    ·
    11 months ago

    It’s a capitalist developing country, and shares exactly the same problems all the other capitalist developing countries share.

    It starting in the same place, with the same population and the same level of development as China, and unlike all the other communists in the world China’s growth was unchecked thanks to Deng. The difference between communist development and capitalist development is laid bare by the difference between the two.