【09.12.13 Hindustan Times】India-inspired inside China

和解团结

原文链接：http://blogs.hindustantimes.com/ ... pired-inside-china/
作者：Reshma Patil


The more I travel in small-town China, the more I miss India and the more I marvel at India.


Technically, the small Chinatown concept is not always correct todescribe the places I’ve been. But I can’t stop using the phrasebecause the biggest Chinese boomtowns with multibillion-dollar GDPsseem confined to a small world.



These are super-sized urban sprawls with no trace of the long lostpaddy fields. Big building blocks, malls, boulevards and highways havegobbled up open spaces. Indian tourists to China get very impressedwith these big buildings. It’s a case of neighbour’s envy on both sides.

India’s biggest cities don’t have the skyscrapers and highways ofChina’s smallest towns. China doesn’t have the English-speaking, highlyeducated and driven manpower to fill up these skyscrapers.
A building boom alone doesn’t build a city.


The Chinese I have interviewed in manufacturing hubs discuss theirimpressions of India with awe. We hardly discuss traffic jams inBangalore, the filth on Mumbai’s streets and the crime in New Delhi.Many Chinese professionals and businessmen seem to come back from Indiainspired by Indians.


“Even in the kids industry, (beggars) they have such will andpassion on their faces, in their eyes,” said a Chinese softwareindustry manager about her visit to Bangalore. Others have remarked howIndians seem so happy! So friendly! So foresighted! Indians work sohard!

This unbounded Indian drive for all kinds of work has wired oursmall towns and villages with big dreamers and an energy that I findlacking in China’s developed but laidback city life.


Foreign managers driven by the recession to China’s cheaper citiestalk about the frustratingly slow pace in training Chinese managerial,engineering and IT manpower.


If India could fix what Prime Minister Manmohan Singh recentlylabelled the ‘urban chaos’, wouldn’t a bigger slice of the world beflocking to set up shop in Indian small towns?


(And no foreigners go hungry in Indian small-towns where evenroadside dhabas serve the basic bread-butter-jam. Bread is a rarity inChinese coffeeshops where pork and beef curry overpowers the aroma ofcoffee).


I don’t get bored in India’s small-towns. I can’t survive longer than two days when I travel beyond Beijing and Shanghai.


On rural reporting tours across India, I’ve always woken up with a choice of newspapers. In China, I may chance upon a
stray copy of a two-day old English newspaper in international hotels and there are no newsstands on every street corner.


Conversation with young new acquaintances slows to a crawl. InIndia, the residents and migrants are the best sources for thebackground, public opinion and culture of a place where a reporter hasparachuted. In China, “I don’t know, I’m a migrant,” is the typicalanswer I get from young Chinese professionals who seem oblivious toevents outside their circle.


As a few Communist Party provincial officials who are tasked withmodernising their cities have told me: ‘Your country is moreinternational’.

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