This huge anthology is divided into six substantive major sections and 22 chapters. Part two covers land tenure, health and education; part three, investment, technology, and irrigation; part four, markets and trade reforms; part five, rural diversification and vertical integration; and part six, poverty alleviation and safety nets. There is, however, no chapter on the environment. The authors are predominantly high-level academics, often with a record of government service as planners or analysts. They come from India, China, the US and Europe. The book is the product of two international conferences held in Beijing and New Delhi, respectively.
Five of the 22 chapters explicitly compare the two cases. This includes two chapters in the Introduction and a concluding one, entitled “Synthesis: Lessons and Challenges.” Chapter six, a model of clarity, by Shenggen Fan and Sukhadeo K. Thorat, compares “Public Investment, Growth, and Poverty Reduction.” Chapter ten, by Ximing Cai and Mark K. Rosegrant, assesses “Future Prospects for Water and Food in China and India.” It is a careful, informative analysis of water problems and relevant policy options.
Some of the chapters discuss both cases but separately. For these, as well as the chapters that deal with only one country, comparative context is provided by short introductions to each of the six parts of the book. A reader interested in detailed comparison of a particular topic needs to read the companion chapter on the same topic, e.g. on agricultural research, chapters seven and eight, or on off-farm employment, chapters 15 and 16. Chapter five, on health care in rural China, by Lung Zhu, is the only one that lacks a counterpart chapter on India. It is an excellent and stark analysis of health insecurity in rural China. Lung notes that in contrast to China, village health-workers are paid by the Indian state.
Scholars and policy makers who are not particularly interested in the comparison but only in one of the two countries will find this volume very useful because of its generally high quality. Each chapter contains valuable data, sometimes rather technical, often based on field research, as well as authoritative analysis, performance evaluations and policy recommendations. Much can be learned about reform processes, since such issues as initial conditions and sequencing come into play. A brief review cannot do justice to the rich and diverse offerings in this collection.
Sino-Indian comparisons have become quite popular, especially since India's turn to economic liberalization. This book enables readers to learn a lot about who is ahead and who is behind. Both India and China have scored great successes but India has lagged behind China in terms of indices such as agricultural growth rates and poverty reduction. Both countries successfully reduced rural poverty. China, in part because of the one-time gains of the period l978–84, when the impoverishing effects of the “grain as the key link” policy were overcome, succeeded more spectacularly than India. China's rural industrialization also played an important poverty-reduction role, whereas in India, earnings from the small informal off-farm sector have not provided a route out of poverty.
Various authors take note of systemic differences between the two states – political, economic, social and cultural – but there is no sustained analysis of their impact on rural reform and development. With regard to differences in the political system, authors note the highly concentrated power of Mao's totalitarian regime, which made possible the rapid adoption and implementation of far-reaching transformative policies but also the catastrophic errors exemplified by the Great Leap Forward.
Since 1978, the more deliberate policy making process of China's retreat to authoritarianism enabled the regime to avoid similarly large-scale policy errors yet still take decisive action. India's slow-moving democracy – one author calls it a “debating society” – contrasts with China's political capacity to implement reforms without requiring for societal consent. Thus, both have liberalized markets, but while China fully embraced a new market- and export-oriented economic policy, India moved more slowly and less decisively because of political obstacles. At the same time, the absence of democracy in China has made possible the continued disregard of rural interests and the maintenance of the privileged position of the urban–industrial sector. Indeed, the emerging fusion of powerful bureaucratic and economic interests, especially at the local level, suggests that despite recent efforts by the Centre, policies favourable to farmers may not be well implemented.
Agricultural interests in India's democracy have had a significant voice in the political process. But this has not extended to India's rural poor. Wealthier rural elites dominate the state legislatures. They distorted the land reform of the l950s, e.g. by evicting unrecorded tenants, and continue to wield much influence. To this day, landlessness is “far more widespread than officially recognized” and tenant insecurity continues to be a major problem. In China, Yang Yao's chapter on land, which is sensitive to the political dimension, notes the insecurity of tenure in the land contracting system and the rising problem of landlessness in China stemming from sales by local governments of land to local developers, much to the disadvantage of farmers. The land issue is an opportunity for full-scale, systematic comparison. Doing so would enable analysts to go beyond easy generalizations about the relative advantages of democracy and dictatorship.
The book also offers suggestions as to what each country can learn from the other. For instance, India's negative and positive experiences with agricultural subsidies should be of interest to Chinese policy makers, since the country is making a transition from taxing to subsidizing agriculture.
The concluding discussion calls for maintenance of rapid growth as essential to the achievement of such goals as poverty reduction. “If their high growth rates cannot be maintained, social unrest or even breakdown of existing social, political, and economic systems will inevitably (my italics) occur” (p. 465). The book thus ends on a sombre note. Both India and China have a long way to go to on the road to development.
