this post was submitted on 25 Oct 2023
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the_dunk_tank
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.