The Secret Sauce Of The China-India Rivalry Is Education

11/7/2024 7:01:09 PM

(MENAFN- Live Mint) (Bloomberg Opinion) -- The world's two most-populous nations began to open up to the world around
the same time,
in the early 1990s. But while both grew rapidly and pulled hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, China's
per capita income is now more than double India's, when their currencies are adjusted for their true purchasing
power.
What's behind the divergence?

Beijing and New Delhi pursued quite
separate paths to globalization. One set its sights on becoming the world's factory, starting with toys and electronics, and moving on to electric cars and semiconductors. The other emphasized services like computer software. Their population
structures were dissimilar, too. A one-child policy gave rise to a pronounced youth bulge and
brought China
to the brink
of rich-country status before it started turning old. India's demographic destiny is playing
out now, though
minus the jobs to absorb surplus farm labor.

And then there are differences in political institutions. China's is a single-party state, while
India is a messy, multiparty, electoral democracy.

This is the conventional narrative. But what if there was a more fundamental force operating beneath the surface, a sharp departure in the long history of how the two nations
embraced modern education? That's the thesis of
The Making of China and India in 21st Century, a new paper
by Nitin Kumar Bharti and Li Yang. The
scholars at the Paris School of Economics' World Inequality Lab have pored over official reports and yearbooks going back to 1900 to make a database of who studied what
in the two countries,
for how long, and what was taught to them. The different courses charted by China and India for the last 100 years may have led to striking outcomes for human capital and productivity.

Here's what Bharti and Yang found. Thanks to a
50-year head-start in exposure to Western learning, India had a student population that was eight times bigger than China's at the turn
of the 20th century. China
began to catch up only after
the abolition of the imperial examination system in 1905 bid farewell to Confucianism. By the 1930s, it had achieved parity with India's overall enrolment.

In the 1950s, the newly formed People's Republic kept up a steady pace of expansion, not even allowing the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) to come in the way of secondary schooling. Where the
chaotic decade
extracted a heavy price was
in undergraduate education. In the early 1980s, India's college
enrollment ratio was five times higher
than China's.
By 2020, however, the story had changed: China
was sending a far bigger share of its university-age cohort
to tertiary institutions than India.

The different trajectories
have
their
roots in history. China's late-19th-century Qing dynasty rulers wanted manpower with vocational skills to handle military-related production. By contrast,
India's
British
colonial masters had little
interest in creating a
manufacturing base. So they seeded the education system with
a
bias for producing clerks and junior administrators. Only the more affluent sections of the society had access to government jobs,
and to the education required to land
them. After independence in 1947, India doubled down on
tertiary institutions, investing in elite
colleges at the expense of basic reading and math skills.

The decision to emphasize
tertiary education
was a
top-down
choice for India, where half the individuals born in the 1960s were likely to remain illiterate, compared with 10% in China, according to the Bharti-Yang study. Most school-age Indian kids dropped out quickly (if they even
started), either because nobody came to their villages to teach, or because more hands were
needed to augment the family
labor pool. A
bottom-up strategy involves
giving a large number of
young pupils five years of learning, then enabling an increasingly bigger
subset of them to attend high schools for a total of 12 years of instruction
- before opening pathways to 16 years of education. This is what
China chose.

An even more stark finding of
the study is about college majors. Historically, India has had a preponderance of social-science graduates at the bachelor's degree level. In China, however, the overrepresentation of
humanities, law
and business began to ebb as early as the 1930s as more undergraduates got trained as teachers, scientists, engineers, doctors and farming
experts.

This might have had a bearing on growth. As a 1991 paper by Kevin Murphy, Andrei Shleifer, and Robert Vishny has shown,
a country that wants to expand faster
needs more engineers than lawyers. (Law and economics have seen a revival in China after economic reforms created new demand for human capital in these areas.)

The common view, particularly in the US, is that India is the“land of engineers.” It's true that many tech-industry
founders and chief executives, including the CEOs of Microsoft Corp. and Alphabet Inc., were born and educated in India. But the huge
expansion of its
high-speed train network - or the sophistication of its EVs
- shows that
Bharti and Yang
may have zeroed
in on an often-overlooked source of China's
competitiveness.
“China's higher share of engineering and vocational graduates, combined with a higher share of primary and secondary graduates, lends itself more readily to a focus on manufacturing,” the authors say.

Deng Xiaoping's 1992 tour of southern China signaled Beijing's willingness to engage with capital from the West, while retaining the primacy of the Communist Party.
Just a few months earlier, Manmohan Singh, then
the new Indian finance minister, too, had made a decisive break from decades of Soviet-inspired socialism and isolationism. India, he said, was going to be a major
economic actor.“No power on earth can stop an idea whose time has come,” Singh said, invoking Victor Hugo.

The residues of history, however, are often hard to brush
off. The top-down, elitist bias that the British put into India's education has carried
over. One final finding in the Bharti-Yang
paper proves the point: In 1976, China had 160
million people who had missed out on regular schooling in adult education programs, compared with just 1 million in India. The progeny
of those 159
million extra minds to whom China gave literacy and numeracy
may have played more than a small role in beating
India at growth.