“India is a great nation with great civalization, however, it has been nearly wiped out by the western conquerers.”

I dont know where people get these kind of ideas from. I can recite 3000 year old poems (No, literature is not my profession/expertise). 90% of the educated people in my state probably do. Those old poems, apart from being formally preserved & studied, are part of the proverbs you would normally use in conversation. So, Indian culture is pretty much intact. Ironical that Chinese having their own culture totally wrecked during Cultural Revolution have to say this about others.

However, I also accept your point over culture, but China must also remember it is in another country (Germany) and has to recognise local laws there concerning freedom of speech. If the Chinese didn’t feel able to honor their guests own laws, then they shouldn’t have accepted the honor of being guest nation. Regrettably, the inability of Chinese nationals – anywhere – to express an opinion different from that of their own government is a symbol both of mainland Chinese oppression and of political interference in the arts, neither of which I find particuarly palatable. I had hoped China would have found time to move beyond this in the 20+ years I have been there. It saddens me that it has not made the reforms in this manner I had hoped for and that it once showed signs of embracing.

Please get to know the background of these two guys who attended the Frankfurt Book Fair first: Bei Ling and Dai Qing. Actually, I don’t know these two guys until you mentioned them. I searched the internet and found something. Bei Ling was finacially supported by National Endowment for Democracy in USA, which is the finacial supported by the US parliament. The Color-Revelotion in Georgia and Ukraine are finacial supported by this organization.So you can see the intention of the guy – to feed the national interest of the USA, not for Chinese democracy. Look at the chaos in these country. Once I learnt that, I can say that the Chinese part act correctly. Look at those western countries,including India, they finacially supported all kinds of people, peaceful or riot, to take China into parts. That’s the thing the western conquerors did and are still doing. Because China to some extent a real treat to them for its continuely increasing power sthrengrh. And after 150 years, China is still not united. Don’t forget, India is also a victim of the westerners. Somehow it’s just because India is not strong enough for them, and they didn’t do the same thing as they do to China at present.

Dai Qing is a democratic fighter from 1989. Although lots of young students died in that year, the government have to do so to maintain the stable of the country. If not so, China will not be able to rocket its economy till now and seems far beyond ending. Look at Ruassia and other eastern-europe countries, what they suffered, war? chaos? poor? And is this the consequence of democracy? I should say, if the government didn’t take any actions, China will be separated since 1989. India will far better than China now. Just think of it, will Indian government allow chaos in the entire country for half a year and everything cannot be done? There are lots of examples in western countries to act nearly the same way as China in 1989. After these years, ordinary Chinese people understand the government now, and still have great sympathy to those young and intelligent guys, and they are too idealism. But they do influence China in many ways and the country is getting better and better in its political reforming.

In traditional Chinese way, when the host invite they friends to visit they home, it’s a bad way to embarrass the guest, which actually is rude and if it is in China, the guest will leave without even a word. So, you will see there is a big gap between western and eastern culture (including China, Korea, Janan, Vietnam, Singapore, etc). But the western country didn’t wanna know (in their hearts, not mouths) what Chinese culture really are, if they think it’s right, then it’s right. They just don’t understand.

Thanks!

That said, thank you once again for your insightful comments. – Chris

India & China are different in many ways and they were both suffered by those western conquerors and this is the reason why the two countries are still poor today. So any kind of those superior comments on one is the the mentor of another is basically meaningless, this is my opinion.

My mother is from China and I spent a lot of time in the country. I found Chinese nation is really open-minded and their government is crazy efficient. People are free to critisize the goverment on nearly every issue except the leadship position. And they are actually very rich now, things are changed extremely in the past decades.

I know very little about Liang and I have no right to make a judgement. But my mother said that he was a great thinker and revolutionist, and respected by most Chinese.

To Saed.

There will be a great social problem when you get an uncontrolled explosion of population. Can you provide enough resources to educate those people, to have better welfare, and to create enough jobs? A small mistake will ruin the whole country. China’s One-Child policy are flexible, which means the next generation will have a chance to raise two kids. China are too croweded and I think that is also the case for India. You should know nowadays China has been experiencing a transfor from labor and capitalist condensed industry to high-tech industry. If you went to Shanghai and the Changjiang Delta you will find it. Japan is an “old” country and so be lots of western countries. But their economy seem to be not too bad. To be honest, India is now experiencing what China experienced 30 years ago, population explosion, and you have to maintain a very high economy increasing rate to provide jobs, which will not be an easy task.

I read a lot of comments on the internet that Indian are pround of their democracy which Chinese haven’t. I should say they don’t know China. Singapore actually using a traditional Chinese way to manage the country. Chinese in their instinct are always follow a kind of patriarchim. People are free to do anything but rebelling. Chinese president is elected by the People’s Congress, similiar to the parliament of your country I believe, and the representitives of the people’s congress are elected by citizens directly. So every Chinese president have different family name, and only those qualified people can be the lucky man to manage the big country. Freedom or democracy is a comparative subject, there is no absolute freedom in this world, which is still the law of the jungle. If so, why don’t you want others to believe in Communist or to use a different political system they like or think to be appropriate? So, democracy is just a tool in it’s instinct to feed the national interest.

I realy hate those tones using a democracy cloth to shutt other peoples’ mouth up.

I’m very happy to share my ideas with you and practise my English. I think Chinese and India can together shape the world in the future, they should be brothers.

Thanks!

Well I don’t agree very much with what you’ve said, however dealing with just the wealth aspect, there are many ways to measure that. But in looking at just one – the IMF and World Bank figures for 2008 as per capita GDP, China averages out at USD5,827, and India at USD2,867. But just ten years ago, China’s per capita income was only USD864. China has only improved its per capita wealth in the last decade, fuelled mainly by its construction and infrastructure boom – which is exactly what India is about to go through.

When developing countries with populations in excess of a billion each, it’s really a matter of handling one at a time. I suspect that GDP per capita gap will close over the next decade. As for super rich – three of the worlds top fifteen richest people are Indian. None are Chinese. So measuring wealth is always a moving target, and is not a constant.

Liang Qichao wasn’t exactly an academic slouch either. He had passed the Juren, was a renowned scholar of Confuscianism, but was also a reformist, suggesting China needed more Western style influences in it’s thinking at the time.

You have to take his comments in the context of the day, and I personally find his words somewhat overdone, but rather more genteel than the rhetoric we find from modern China towards India today.

It was the latter point that was the issue I was trying to point out. The relationship and mutual respect between China and India has gone backwards by quite a way since those heady days.