India Speak: The CPR Podcast

Episode 14: Uncovering the Historical Aspects of Sino-India Ties

Episode Summary

We are delighted to present a brand new series hosted by Sushant Singh (Senior Fellow, CPR), featuring leading experts on the multiple facets of Sino-India relations. In the first episode of the series, we are joined by Arunabh Ghosh (Historian and Associate Professor of Modern Chinese, History Department, Harvard University) to unpack Sino-India relations through a historical lens. Together, Singh and Ghosh uncover the relationship between the two neighbours through documented exchanges in the 1950s involving statistics, mathematics and discussions on transnational institutions and scientific networks. They discuss the decline of these exchanges after the 1962 war, why the inadequate academic scholarship has not improved since and the dangers of intermediation of knowledge through a western prism. With China's economic success creating a sense of envy in India, it is important to acknowledge the history of this success, the role of imperial legacies in the border crisis and the need to understand the nature of the Chinese state and what exactly happened between the two great nations. Arunabh Ghosh website: https://scholar.harvard.edu/arunabh.ghosh Books mentioned: Making it Count: Statistics and Statecraft in the early People's Republic of China, Arunabh Ghosh (2020) Great State: China and the World, Timothy Brook (2019) From Rebel to Ruler: One Hundred Years of the Chinese Communist Party, Tony Saich (2021) The Cowshed: Memories of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, Ji Xianlin (2016) Eight Outcasts: Social and Political Marginalization in China Under Mao, Yang Kuisong (2019) How China Escaped Shock Therapy: The Market Reform Debate, Isabella Weber (2021)

Episode Notes

Transcript:

Sushant Singh00:09

Hello and welcome to India Speak: the podcast by the Centre for Policy Research. I'm Sushant Singh, Senior Fellow at CPR. This is the first episode of our series featuring leading experts and academics on the many facets of Sino India relations. Some of them will be looking at the military side of things, while others will focus on the political facets. But today, we will be discussing the historical aspects, looking at China and its relationship with India through a historical lens. To do that, our guest today is a historian of modern China with research and teaching interest in social and economic history, history of science and statecraft, transnational history, and China- India history. Professor Arunabh Ghosh is the Associate Professor of Modern Chinese History at Harvard University. His first book, Making it Count: Statistics and Statecraft in the early People's Republic of China came out in 2020. It investigates how the early People's Republic of China state built a statistical capacity to know the nation through numbers. He has conducted research for the book in Beijing, Guangzhou, New Delhi and Kolkata Arunabh, welcome to India Speak.

Arunabh Ghosh01:26

Thank you Sushant for having me. And it's a real honor to be the first in this new series that CPR is organising. So thank you so much.

Sushant Singh01:33

Thank you. I'd like to begin with your book first, because you mentioned a collaboration between India and China on the statistical front that is hard to imagine today. It involves PC Mahalanobis of the ISI. Can you tell our listeners as to what this collaboration was about? And how do you discover that interesting nugget? And were there other collaborations also at around the same time that we don't know?

Arunabh Ghosh01:56

Great, thank you. Yeah, this is, this is always an intriguing sort of thing, because it was very surprising for me too actually because as you just mentioned, in your very generous introduction, the book that I've written is primarily about statistics in 1950s China. I didn't really expect to encounter such a strong India connection and an India connection that would help me understand crucial aspects of statistics and statistical work in 1950s China. So maybe first, I'll give you a sense of how I chanced upon this, and it really was quite a serendipitous kind of discovery. I think it was, while I was browsing issues of the People's Daily, that I encountered a photograph that showed Mahalanobis with the Chinese Premier, Zhou Enlai, and a bunch of other people. And then the small caption read, "Zhou Enlai host Mahalanobis for dinner". This completely blew me away, this was July of 1957, I had no expectation of something like this being possible. So then I started digging, and eventually discovered that this was actually part of a much more sustained series of exchanges that involve statistics. But why statistics? So what's interesting here is that on the Indian side, which I think a lot of our listeners will be familiar with, the Indian Statistical Institute and PC Mahalanobis, as its director, are central to this early phase of Indian history in terms of planning, in terms of placing statistics at the heart of planning. What Mahalanobis was famous for, not just in India, but globally, was the adoption and expansion of large scale randomised sample survey, this was a relatively new technology at that time. On the Chinese side, what's interesting is that after 1949, the Chinese had explicitly rejected any kind of statistical activity that relied on probabilistic methods, including large scale random sampling. So what happened was, over the first, say, five to eight years of the People's Republic of China from 1949, to about 1956-57, they relied on other means. And by this, I mean, primarily on exhaustive enumeration on attempts to essentially count everything to the final instance of its existence- the census method, if you will. And this as you can imagine, led to tremendous problems, especially in the agricultural sector. So, it was this chance meeting in 1956, when Zhou Enlai actually visits India, and he comes to the Indian Statistical Institute, and is kind of blown away by the work that he sees being done, and then invites Mahalanobis to come to China. This is a short episode where there is a real desire on the part of the Chinese statisticians to learn more about large scale random sampling, because they feel this might allow them to overcome the kinds of problems that they are encountering, because of this overt reliance on essentially the census method of counting everything exhaustively. So that's sort of in a nutshell, what happened and I traced this exchange from about, it's really intensive about 1956 to 59. With a lot of people going back and forth, and things like that. But, for the other part of your question, this is not the only instance of these kinds of exchanges. I think they were happening in other domains. I have recently published an article about who I think is the first Chinese scientist to get a PhD from an Indian University, from Lucknow University. He was a student of Birbal Sahni. But I'm collaborating with a range of other scholars, in particular by mining archival materials that were thus far not easily available, including actually, the recently declassified Nehru papers at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library. And our hope is really to, to rediscover the actual breadth of exchanges that were going on in the 50s, beyond the sort of narrative of Indi Chini bhai bhai and sort of the cultural, diplomatic kind of exchanges, but much more substantive exchanges that are going on. So I think there is actually a lot more to discover. And what I found are essentially crumbs that should lead us to explore more.

Sushant Singh05:41

So were these exchanges Arunabh, were they facilitated by the state, were they driven by the state, both the Chinese state and the Indian state over these exchanges, like the Science one, you refer to that was happening primarily through Cambridge and Europe? Because Birbal Sahini was such a major prominent scientist in Asia at that point in time, and the Chinese wanted to collaborate with them. So were they driven by individuals or what they're driven by state, or were they driven by some other mechanics or processes?

Arunabh Ghosh06:09

Right, I think you find instances of both. There is certainly a very strong state element in many of these exchanges. Some of these, because of the sort of larger geopolitics of the moment, sort of the emergence of a certain kind of third world politics, or, you know, global south solidarity. I'm using these terms slightly, ahistorically, Global South wasn't used in the 1950s, but you know, this postcolonial moment, if you will. So there is a lot of state interest and an attempt to bring people from both China and India as part of, you know, bringing people from different parts of the post colonial world together. But, I think you have a lot of instances where there are other mechanisms at play. So the one that I just mentioned, and that you also brought up about the scientists, the Paleobotanist - that is about scientific networks, pre existing scientific networks, that then carry on into post 1945, 49, 47, into the 1950s. But you also have interesting transnational political movements that are emerging that have to do with emerging Cold War politics, but also have to do with an attempt at an institutional level to engage. So the ways in which people are thinking of establishing transnational institutions, like the UN, but for Asia, for instance. And here, there is some state support, but not necessarily it's driven by the state. So this might be individual's conceiving some kind of Asian Association, say, for the advancement of a particular area of knowledge. Then maybe someone like Nehru will get on board or Zhou Enlai will get on board and so on. But the impetus is coming from elsewhere. So I think part of the goal has to be to recognise the multiplicities of possibilities. With a small footnote or asterisk to this, of course, this is more true on the Chinese side than on the Indian side where, given the strong nature of the state in China, by this time already, at some point, it was necessary to get state approval, and that could be a harder process.That may have led to greater state involvement as part of getting that approval. On the Indian side, I think you see even more diversity.

Sushant Singh06:15

Any examples of these associations which you refer to which were pan-Asian associations?

Arunabh Ghosh07:33

So there were these very interesting discussions right after the establishment of the UN, to set up, under UNESCO and other organisations, sort of scientific networks in Asia. So people like Joseph Needham, and I'm blanking on a few of the other names who are involved, were in conversation with people on the Indian side, for instance, with people like Homi Bhabha at TIFR, DD Kosambi, and also with mathematicians at Tsinghua University and also later on after 1949 in Taiwan, about say, establish the Institute of Mathematical Research. Again, the idea was not just mathematics in terms of pure mathematics, but also in terms of how it applies to physics and research in the physical sciences, and so on. So things like that, which were sprouts if you will, did not lead anywhere. Mahalanobis himself wanted to set up a statistics association for Asia and the Pacific, I think I forgot the exact acronym. So there are two that come to mind immediately.

Sushant Singh09:14

Arunabh, when does this kind of collaboration and cooperation end? Is it the 1962 war? Is it 1959 when the border tensions started increasing? Or is it well before that, something else happened before that?

Arunabh Ghosh09:28

No, those are two hugely important moments. 1959 March, when the Dalai Lama escaped, I think is a huge moment, at least from a state to state perspective in terms of a cooling of enthusiasm. 1962, of course, then becomes like a major wedge. But it's important to also recognise the internal dynamics of these things. The 1950s is a very interesting period in Chinese history, with a lot of interesting upheavals that impact the intellectual world, the world of academia in very specific ways. So, intellectuals are targeted, for instance, in 1957 in the anti-writers movement. So those things also have an impact on the possibilities for these kinds of exchanges. So one has to be mindful of the international sort of bilateral kinds of relations, but also then the domestic developments that might impact this sort of engagement.

Sushant Singh10:17

Arunabh, there is something else you have written a lot about in the public domain - the inadequate scholarship on China and India? Can you give our listeners an overview of the kind of scholarship on China in modern times, you know, leading to the contemporary era? And also, what are the reasons for this inadequacy in studying China and India? Why have we not done better?

Arunabh Ghosh10:36

Right, this is a great question. It's a very big question. Before I get into the China studies, in India case, I should actually preface any response by saying there is a larger malaise in the Indian academia in terms of how we study and understand the rest of the world. So the China case is a very important case within a larger malaise, where I think we lack expertise on pretty much anything, including our neighbours, including the immediate neighbours in the South Asian context, where we haven't devoted adequate resources over the past several decades. But in the Chinese case, what's interesting is that you see a period of intense actual interest in the first half of the 20th century, a really important moment is the establishment of China Bhavan at Shanti Niketan, Tagore's University, that becomes the first research centre dedicated to studying China, primarily at that time studying ancient Chinese history – so, looking at the expansion of Buddhism in China and  looking at questions of linguistic and cultural exchange, things like that. But what's important about that moment from a research perspective, is that you have the establishment of the first dedicated China Studies library in India. And I think for any good research to take place, the necessary, but insufficient, of course, but necessary condition is a good research library. So that kernel was established in the 1930s. And during this time, I think the other thing to remember about sort of Indian engagement with China is that there is actually a tremendous amount of interest at the popular level where people are travelling back and forth, and there are stories of people travelling to China writing travelogues, often not in English, but in different vernacular languages that you can find. And some of these have begun to be translated now. So there are several in Bengali that have not been translated. But there are there are others,  there's essentially a memoir called Chīn Me Terah Mās (13 months in China), which was essentially a memoir of a British Indian Army soldier who spent time in China serving, if I remember correctly, during the Boxer Rebellion, and then he writes about it. So there was that kind of, I think, at a popular level, a certain kind of engagement. In terms of scholarship, I think you would expect that after 1947, after 1949, there would be a real investment. And there certainly was an attempt to bring about serious exchanges at a bilateral level. But you don't really see the kind of investment that you would expect. Given that, you know, this is India's largest neighbour. And similarly for China, this is China's largest neighbour, you see the establishment at China Bhavan and a few other places, an attempt to establish language programs. In the 1950s, they attempted to begin bilateral exchanges of students and things like that. But 1962 then becomes a huge, as I think many people recognise, sort of a huge stumbling block. But the irony in my opinion is that instead of leading, therefore, to a greater sort of investment in studying and understanding China, even if it is from a narrow perspective, why did we get what happened in 1962 so wrong? Why did the leadership, why didn't the intelligentsia, the sort of political elite that was informing the leadership, why did they get things so wrong? Instead of seeing greater engagement, greater desire to try and understand China, you saw sort of a retreat. So 1962 becomes this moment, I think, where you see not investment, but disinvestment in China studies, and that has in some ways lingered into the present, I feel, where China studies remains a fairly niche kind of subject, discipline or domain of knowledge to pursue. But that's at the meta or macro level. There are other things at the institutional and micro level that I think are also very important to recognise. So one of the things of course, I had mentioned library, the other thing that's absolutely essential in studying China, of course, is his mastery of the Chinese language. While mastery might be an extreme case, but at least a sufficient degree of competence, to engage with scholars in China, to engage with people in China, to read materials in Chinese, and so on. And what has developed in India and I think here, it's the expansion of a model that we find in JNU, but then that seems to have spread to other institutions in India as sort of best practices, is a real separation of the School of Languages where you have excellent teachers of Chinese and students who actually learn Chinese to a high degree of competence. And then places like SSS (School of Social Sciences) and the SIS (School of International Studies) that are then working on China substantively. You see a real divide here, so the people who do language don't engage in subject domain expertise, and vice versa. And this I think, over the long run has led to a sort of it has really debilitated this kind of area studies in India. So you have a range of China scholars now who were produced by JNU, and a handful of other institutions that cannot engage at the level that you would expect with material in Chinese, with scholars in China. And therefore I think it sort of hamstrings our ability to then understand the complexity of a country as large and as diverse as China is,

Sushant Singh15:46

Arunabh, I understand that the shadow of 1962 looms large, but after 1962, there is 1988 when Rajiv Gandhi goes and meets Deng Xiaoping, then there is 2004 and this current century that we are in, by now things should have changed, things should have improved. Why didn't anything change in the last 30-40 years?

Arunabh Ghosh16:06

Yeah, I fully agree things should have changed dramatically. And why they haven't is a bit of a mystery, but also not entirely in the sense that I think a lot of this area studies impetus. Unfortunately, we have enough historical instances of this and the best example is the evolution of area studies in the US often emerges from the recognition of the state, that these are strategic areas that we need expertise in, and then the funnelling in of resources. But what's interesting in the US case, and I think this would have had a salutary sort of effect if it had been pursued in India, is that yes, you create sort of a very narrow, strategically focused kind of expertise, but in supporting area studies broadly, you also provide grounds for a much wider engagement. So in the US, you see not only this sort of foreign policy and sort of contemporary China focused academic community, but a much wider community that has expertise in China now. Something like that could have happened in India, if there was concerted state support starting after 1988, as you said, or even more recently. Now, that did not happen. I think this is a failure of leadership in many ways. Again, as I mentioned earlier, it speaks to a broader failure of higher education in India. I think the Chinese case is an example, China studies is an example of this. Another footnote to this, of course, is that there are interesting developments more recently now, with private universities trying to sort of establish some kind of presence in China studies. It's very early, it's not clear how successful they will be. But I think it represents a recognition at least from, if not the state itself, then from society, more broadly speaking, that we need to know more as a society. So you know, there are private institutions that have set up centres for China studies that are trying to set up MA programs, and things like that, but it's very early days still, in that process.

Sushant Singh17:55

Arunabh, you brought up western area studies model. Most Indian scholars use Western research and Western scholars to understand and study modern China and obviously, these in the field of national security and diplomacy as well. To your mind, what are the dangers of doing this for Indian scholars and for Indian policymakers? This intermediation of knowledge through a Western prism? What are the dangers of this?

Arunabh Ghosh18:18

Yeah, I think this is hugely important. And it speaks very much to things we were just discussing in terms of, you know, an ability to work with primary materials ourselves, inability to form our own conclusions based on our reading, as opposed to reading essentially someone else's interpretation of events or documentary evidence. At a general level, I think that the danger is that essentially, in being second hand consumers of knowledge, and then formulating our own sort of interpretations, we are giving up, in some ways, a certain kind of agency in terms of formulating the questions and frameworks themselves. Which is not to say that all of the existing work that emerges primarily in the Anglophone, but say the West, broadly speaking, on China is useless – most of it's actually very interesting and very useful. But it is in some ways, granting over our ability to ask our own questions. And I think asking those questions with, you know, particular contexts that are South Asia specific or India specific in mind. These don't have to do with bilateral relations only, these have to do with a whole range of things that are going on in India right now, whether it's urban policy, whether it's health policy, I mean, Omicron and COVID is a great example. Right? How do we think about policy in India, vis a vis other places, including China? So I think if we formulate the questions, then the frameworks, the way in which we look for evidence, all of that follows. So I think in some ways, there's a kind of path dependence that emerges from where you start. And so that is, I think, at a very broad methodological level the danger here. More specifically, I think if you take a look at specific instances, then of course it is that you are essentially relying upon other strategic goals with which a particular policy piece may have been written, and then you have to try and interpret that and make it applicable to say, the Indian case, as might be what happens a lot and that again, is in some ways a needless exercise. You're not treating it as a data point, but as essentially, largely informing your perspective altogether.

Sushant Singh20:30

Would it be fair to say that even though India and China have been neighbours, they have been and remain distant in that sense. They've never been neighbours? They've been physical neighbours, but they've not been neighbours in other senses. Is that true?

Arunabh Ghosh20:41

Yeah. So this is I think, yes, the short answer is yes. But there is a footnote or a complicated answer that would be no. The yes is in terms of contemporary nation states, I think the ways in which the Republic of India and the People's Republic of China see each other.  The Himalayas are not just a physical barrier, you know, they are a barrier in other ways. But if you think in a slightly longer historical sense, then people from both subcontinents, if you think of East Asia, China and India, as subcontinental sort of spaces, have been meeting and intermingling in other parts of the world. So Southeast Asia is a great example of this. The Caribbean is another great example of this. And of course, now much more recently, actually, the US is a good example of this, because you have roughly, I think, 5 million people of Indian descent in the US and roughly 5 million people of Chinese descent in the US. So there is actual engagement in other spheres, but from a contemporary nation state perspective, in China and in India. Yes, you're totally right, that there has been I think there is a real impasse in terms of bilateral engagement and understanding. So that's why you fixate on the specific moments like Amir Khan's amazing popularity in China, it becomes this thing to wonder at because it's so unusual, it's so exceptional.

Sushant Singh21:54

And you sometimes wonder that China is India's biggest trading partner, and by a long distance, and you still don't have that kind of neighbourly relations? 

Arunabh Ghosh22:00

Absolutely, that's the other reality. And I mean, I think it's gone over $100 billion in mutual trade now, right, in spite of all the political rhetoric of not buying Chinese products, and so on. So there are ways in which the Chinese and Indian economy are actually much more deeply interlinked than people realise. But again, in terms of popular perceptions, there is a real divide.

Sushant Singh22:28

Arunabh, as a historian, what is the biggest myth about China in India that you constantly face and maybe even get irritated about? And similarly, when you are in China, what is the biggest misconception or misunderstanding about India that gets your goat?

Arunabh Ghosh22:42

I don't know if I have a good answer about this, because this, again, perhaps speaks to some of the problems you are alluding to. I think in India, the thing that I find the most galling at times is the sheer ignorance about China. There really isn't much of a sense, besides sort of a very sort of contemporary notion. And of course, more recently, that it's this amazing success story, and so on. It's not a myth, but it's the constant sort of raising China up onto a particular kind of pedestal by a certain set of Indian elite, I should say. If you go beyond that, there isn't even that much. There is no sense, no real acknowledgement of what it is. The other thing I should actually add in terms of it's an irritating myth, of course, is this complaint about the quality of Chinese products that you do hear a lot, which I think is also somewhat misplaced. But it itself would be interesting to research in terms of, you know, about how much of this is, you know, it's by design in terms of the ways in which commodities are flowing in terms of the ways in which markets are understood, and where higher quality versus low quality products are being sent. And, of course, the role of intermediaries, the people who are actually importing stuff, which might be on the Indian side. Anyway, that's an aside. So as I said, the bigger thing for me, though, is not so much a myth, but just ignorance, the sort of the very broad strokes generalisations that exist about China, that can be a bit of an irritation. 

On the Chinese side, it's not so much ignorance, as opposed to there is sort of a romanticisation. It's interesting, in more recent terms, mostly in the past two decades, as the Chinese economy has taken off, and there's a certain kind of confidence amongst the Chinese middle class about their own place in the world and their own sort of economic growth – that, you know, India is now it's, in some ways, an interesting kind of Orientalisation, India is the land of mystical wisdom and the power of religion and morality and things like that. This is not a dominant strain, but you do hear it's certainly distinct amongst a certain set of, again, middle class elite Chinese. And this I find very interesting in terms of it's not longer even seen in comparative terms, but it's seen as this again, you can, as I said, you can orientalise it and you can almost romanticise it. So this is the place you would need to visit if you are, you know, you're in the throes of a crisis of materialism, then India is the place that you could go. So this certainly happens amongst elite, very rich Chinese that you know, partly this is driven by sort of the tourism surrounding Buddhism. So you visit the various holy sites in South Asia, in India, in particular, that are linked to Buddhism and of course, this is not just Chinese tourists, but also Japanese tourists, tourists from Southeast Asia. But there's this kind of search for a certain kind of moral, or religious equanimity. So that's something that I find kind of both interesting and a little irritating. But it's that perception is devolved to just that.

Sushant Singh25:53

And yoga is well, we have done a bit by putting yoga in the mix as well.

Arunabh Ghosh25:57

Yes, thank you. Yoga, I feel, is a global phenomenon. It's not restricted to the Chinese themselves.

Sushant Singh26:06

You know, China's economic success and rise as a global power has really created a sense of China envy in India, the one you alluded to in your answer. The secret of Chinese success is seen in its character as a centralised authoritarian state, unlike India's very raucous democracy. Is that a fair understanding of contemporary China in India? And if not, why not?

Arunabh Ghosh26:28

I think it's a fair understanding of what the understanding in India is or a fair reflection of what the understanding in India is. But, I think it's sort of again, this is the understanding at again, at the level of sort of the elite intelligentia in India, right? I think that's not the popular perception. And so, I guess this would be my answer to your question, if I was only looking at the elite response would be this kind of envy at, or the hankering for a strong, centralised authoritarian state. So there isn't much wiggle room to say that, yes, it's relatively authoritarian compared to other parts of the world. It's relatively centralised, compared to other parts of the world. But I think in some ways, framing it in this way, begs the question, because one sort of looks at it today without acknowledging both the recent history- the history of the past 70 years since 1949, but also the longer history of the nature of the state and state society relations in China. The same thing is being done on the Indian side, right. So you're not acknowledging the longer history in India of states, a centralised state, the rule, the nature of state- society relations, and so on. But I think one important test, or a question one should ask, when we frame it this way is this, look at how successful China is. And it's because of its strong, centralised authoritarian state, you have to then acknowledge by that same token, that all the failures before the success should also be attributed to precisely the same thing – the fact that it is a strong centralised authoritarian state. And these failures are not trivial, these failures are failures that led to arguably the largest famine, in absolute terms in human history. This is the great famine of the late 1950s. It led to tremendous turmoil in the decades that followed, essentially sort of tearing society apart from the inside. So I think we have to recognise that certain things come with a strong centralised authoritarian state. It can be very effective in certain areas, but the failures can also be cataclysmic. So that's one thing to remember. Then the other is to what extent, this is where the longer your historical point becomes important, to what extent can a particular contemporary reality that has a larger sort of historical set of antecedents, how can you sort of apply that to a place like the Indian subcontinent, which is tremendously different. A simple way to think about this is the way in which we understand the centrality of the state, or the presence of a large centralised state, through the longer history of the subcontinent. In the Indian subcontinent, a large centralised state is the exception, not the rule. Whereas if you were to generalise that's the opposite case, in the Chinese case, it is a rule and the exceptions are when there is disarray and being broken apart. So, there is a very different sense altogether about how individuals think about the state. And I think until this is acknowledged and taken up seriously, this kind of very superficial envy and like, oh, all we need is a strong state that can ride roughshod over, you know, whether it's people's rights or other kinds of environmental regulations and so on, I think, will have a certain kind of appeal, but is extremely dangerous. 

Sushant Singh29:52

I also think that it comes out of a certain ignorance of China because there is a certain amount of federalism in the Communist Party model as well. The provinces and the districts decide what they wish to do in terms of so many policies that they have at their other levels and the competition among these provinces and districts. And even if you look at  some of the public health, public education things, you know, that have also come about because of that.

Arunabh Ghosh30:20

Absolutely, this is hugely important and this, again, speaks to thinking of China as a sort of given unit and not recognising actually, that it's demographically, while still, but maybe not for very long larger than India, but geographically significantly larger with a tremendous amount of variation. And then, the way in which the provinces run. There's a very good example from just very recently, which is what happened in the city of Xi An. And the massive lockdown that took place in Xi An because of the cases of COVID that were discovered. And if you look at the internal chatter, and the way in which people are understanding this within China, Xi An has historically been seen as a relatively poorly run city, compared to say, Shanghai or Beijing or some of the other cities. And so there were people who were not surprised that you saw mismanagement and all those cases about people being turned away from hospitals and so on, because the lockdown is being imposed. But then that led to other kinds of hardship. These are people who are not, you know, who are seeking help, not because of COVID, but for other medical, medical reasons. So there was this kind of internal recognition of diversity, variation, different ways in which different provinces have responded. I mean, one of the things you see, for instance, is the tremendous inequality right now within China, where the coastal provinces are significantly richer than the inland provinces. So again, that needs to be explained and understood, it can't be explained, understood with this sort of unitary, centralised authoritarian state model. So yeah, that's very important.

Sushant Singh31:50

Arunabh, this border crisis that India and China face, which is the most contemporary issue when Indians think of China today. History plays a role in it, the colonial part, the Imperial past, how important is the role of history in the kind of crisis that we see between India and China now?

Arunabh Ghosh32:07

So I think history is important at two levels. One, is just as you just alluded, I think, recognising that a lot of these problems have their origins in the Imperial and colonial legacies that both the Republic of India and the People's Republic of China are dealing with, but more than just dealing with, recognising that, in some ways, enthusiastically both states, accepted these Imperial legacies – in particular, the territorial imaginaries and the realities of British India, of the Qing empire. So I think recognising this is the first step. And there is, I think, in both countries, again amongst the elite and the intelligentsia. They are very quick to blame Imperial and colonial legacies when it comes to the other country, but are very slow to recognise the fact that similar logics are operating for them too. So at a meta historical level, I think that's hugely important. But I think at a more micro level in terms of the 20th century itself, I think historical scholarship is extremely important in understanding what exactly happened. And how to complicate the easy and grand narratives that exist. So right now, for instance, in India, it's very popular to blame everything on Nehru. Earlier it used to be Krishna Menon, and now it's Nehru. But I think this does a disservice to actually understanding what were essentially a series of very complex moments, and trying to understand why decisions were made the way they were, and so on. So I think the first step would also be to step away from the blame game. This is of course for popular consumption, this is what you want to do. It's easy to play things off and have people to blame. But from a historical scholarship perspective, I think this needs to happen on both sides. And here, the big challenge is access to archival materials, getting a sense of the deliberations as they happen in those specific moments. There's been good work on the Indian side recently, as you of course, I'm sure are also aware. Nirupama Menon Rao has just published a book and there's a whole host of other books that have tried to explore the border crisis and its evolution. We have seen some work on the Chinese side also, but the archives on the Chinese side remain closed. So it's been difficult for scholars outside of the PRC to explore these questions from the PRC’s side, in many ways.

Sushant Singh34:37

Arunabh before I let you go, can you suggest three books about modern China that you would recommend to those interested in understanding the country better?

Arunabh Ghosh34:44

This is there's been so many good books published in the past 2-3 years that this is an extremely difficult task. So if I can mention a few without restricting myself to three, then I can touch upon a few different areas that might be of interest to readers. So one that emerges out of the conversation we've had about the nature of the state and the nature of the Chinese state in particular, I think a really interesting book would be Great State: China and the World, Timothy Brook (2019), which tries to look at the way in which we should understand the nature of the Chinese state through a longer perspective, not just 20th century. So Brooke is primarily a historian of the Ming, but then writes expansively. So that would be a great book to get a slightly longer perspective on the history of the Chinese state itself. There's a good book on the history of the party that was just published by Tony Saich, my colleague at the Kennedy School here called From Rebel to Ruler: One Hundred Years of the Chinese Communist Party (2021). That gives you more of a sense of how the party, which is, it's a pretty dramatic story, because it's a party that was on the fringes in the early 1920s. And by 1949, came to dominate the largest country in the world. And now, the largest economy in the world is soon to be or if by PPP terms already there. So that's another book that gives you party history.There's a great book by the Chinese historian Yang Kuisong called     Eight Outcasts: Social and Political Marginalization in China Under Mao (2019). It was recently translated into English and this provides a very different perspective on post 1949 Chinese history, it's from the bottom up. As the title suggests, it's the story of eight people who had to undergo because of, you know, their individual identities made them outliers, or a certain kind of minority, you know, it could be because of their sexuality, it could be because of other kinds of things, and how they endured the first two, three decades of the PRC. I'm reading right now, after a long time. Finally, I've been meaning to write a memoir. And this might be of interest again, to an Indian audience. It's a memoir by probably China's most famous      Indologist, a man by the name of Ji Xianlin, who wrote a memoir called The Cowshed: Memories of the Chinese Cultural Revolution (2016)and it's his experience of the Cultural Revolution. He was a very prominent professor. He was at Peking University, the most prominent university in China, and endured     all kinds of hardship during the cultural revolution and he wrote about it. So that's another fascinating take. Finally, one last book I can mention, which I think is, again, speaks to sort of, the economic takeoff of China, starting in the 1980s,but     provides a sort of much more nuanced perspective on the kinds of decisions that were taken, is a book by the economic economist and economic historian Isabella Weber called, How China Escaped Shock Therapy: The Market Reform Debate (2021). And this is sort of about price controls and the ways in which price controls were imposed in the early 1980s, as China is     liberalising, so a very interesting economic history that is, in some ways, quite important today also in trying to understand the dramatic growth of the Chinese economy. So obviously mentioned more than more than more than three. I have many more dimensions, but maybe I'll stop there.

Sushant Singh37:51

Arunabh thank you so much for your time and for this wonderful conversation. It was it was really nice. Thank you so much.

Arunabh Ghosh37:58

Great. Thank you for having me.

Sushant Singh38:03

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