My Take | Something about India and China: why democracy, why autocracy?

For being a democracy, modern India often gets a pass on most things Western nations would jump on with other countries. As an authoritarian state, China is put under the microscope and is attacked for the slightest offence.

Ultimately, though, from the standpoint of genuine understanding, rather than just scratching the surface with knee-jerk attacks, you need to get to their underlying social structures and histories. The American political theorist Francis Fukuyama provides a sustained analysis that compares and contrasts those of the two countries that I find highly suggestive and provocative.

It’s found in his 2011 book, The Origins of Political Order, as well as its sequel, Political Order and Political Decay. Both books have an amazing scholarly range and erudition, and display an intellectual passion and energy you don’t usually find in academic works. I greatly admire both books in the way that I rather dislike the one that made him famous, The End of History and the Last Man, which was almost universally trashed by Hegel scholars and rendered obsolete after September 11, 2001.

In the following, I make no claims whether Fukuyama was right or wrong about China and India, only that he makes a lot of sense to me.

One thing I most admire about his work here is that he paid scant attention to Marxism, seeing that the Chinese “communist” state is deeply rooted in the Chinese historical experience rather than any Marxist theory or practice.

Some numbers will suffice to consider the Chinese experience of their first epochs, which continue to shape us today. During the semi-mythical period of the Xia, there were possibly 3,000 polities or territorial entities; the Shang had 1,800. With Western Zhou, it was reduced to 170. By the time of the Eastern Zhou, it was just 23 (the Spring and Autumn period) and then seven (the Warring States period).