我爱英语网 > 英语学林 > 信息 > 印度对中国的畏惧(India’s fear of China) 印度对中国的畏惧(India’s fear of China) 我爱英语网  http://www.52en.com As India’s prime minister goes to China, Indians should learn that they have less to fear from their giant neighbour than they think 随着印度总理的访华，印度人应该知道，对于中国这样一个大国邻居，他们想象中的畏惧其实远远大于实际情况。 英文原载《经济学人》(The Economist, Jun 24th 2003) 译注：Diana SOME comparisons are stark[绝对的] enough to generate a national inferiority[劣等] complex[情结]. In 1980, India had about 687m people, 300m fewer than China. Living standards, as measured by purchasing power per head, were roughly the same. Then, as China embraced modernity with a sometimes ugly but burning passion, it left India behind. In the next 21 years, India outperformed[胜过] its neighbour in almost nothing but population growth. 很多方面的比较足以使他们产生这种民族自卑感。在1980年，印度有大约6.87亿人口，比中国还少3亿人。而两个国家的生活水平，如果按照人均购买力来算的话，基本相同。然而凭着一种燃烧着的激情，虽然这种激情有时尽显丑态，中国的现代化建设将印度远远的甩在了后面。在接下来的21年里，印度超越中国邻居的表现仅仅在人口的增长方面。 By 2001, India had 1,033m people against China’s 1,272m. But China’s national income per head, according to the World Bank, was $890, nearly double India’s $450. Adjusted for[以..判断] purchasing power, the Chinese were still 70% wealthier than Indians were. Some 5% of Chinese now live below the national poverty line, compared with 29% of Indians. 在2001年，印度有1，033，000，000人口，而中国只有1，272，000，000。而根据世界银行的统计，中国的人均国民收入是890美元，是450美元的印度的近两倍。在购买力上，中国仍比印度富70%。大约有5%的中国人生活在贫困线以下，而印度有29%的人。 Many Indians now often ask why the West is so obsessed with[困惑] China’s economic success. But the obsession[困惑] is India’s, too. Comparison with China has become a distorting mirror in which Indians see their country’s shortcomings grotesquely magnified[荒诞般扩大]. The same goes for India’s sense of geopolitical[地缘政治] inferiority. An accident of history made China one of the five permanent, veto-wielding[常任理事] members of the United Nations Security Council, but that seat now seems to belong to it as of right. India, feeling it should have one too, is just one of a number of big countries with a claim, and laments[哀伤] its comparative geopolitical weakness. 许多印度人现在常常想不通为什么西方人对中国的经济发展成就如此困惑。而事实上，印度人自己何尝不是这样。与中国的比较已经成为印度人民荒诞般放大自己国家缺点的一面哈哈镜。同样的，也使他们产生了这种地缘政治劣势感。一个偶然的历史事件使中国成为了联合国安理会具有表决权的五个常任理事国之一，而现在看来，这个席位则理应属于中国。印度虽感自己也应获得一个这样的地位，但只不过是很多强烈要求的大国之一，并为自己这种地缘政治上的弱势而哀伤。 For Indians, the “Chinese threat” comes in at least three forms: the geopolitical panic that rivalry with[竞争] China may one day lead to another war between them; the economic nightmare of an India of underemployed farm labourers spending their meagre[微薄的] earnings on imported Chinese goods; and the ideological[意识形态的] doubt that maybe India’s heroic experiment with democracy has exacted an even higher price than has China’s erratic[反复无常的] dictatorship. 对于印度，所谓“中国威胁论”来自至少以下三种形式：一是地缘政治恐慌，即同中国的竞争有朝一日终会导致他们间的另一场战争；二是经济厄运，即印度大量闲置的农村劳动力花着微薄的收入去购买由中国进口的商品；三是意识形态的动摇，即也许比起中国的随意性很大的专制政治，印度英勇的民主试验反而需要付出更高的代价。 This was not the way Jawaharlal Nehru[尼赫鲁（1889-1964）印度首任总理] planned it. India’s relations with China are still scarred by the bitterness that ended its first prime minister’s dream of Hindi-Chini Bhai Bhai[印地秦尼，巴依巴依（中印人民是兄弟）], Indo-Chinese brotherhood, sealed in a treaty in 1954. Sibling tension soon surfaced, and sharpened when India gave sanctuary[避难] in 1959 to the Dalai Lama[达赖喇嘛] and 100,000 of his followers as they fled[逃亡] China’s suppression[镇压] of an uprising[起义] in Tibet. It ended, in humiliating betrayal for Mr Nehru and India, in the war of 1962. The conflict, which grew out of territorial disputes[领土争端], ended in a comprehensive Chinese victory. It took a quarter of a century for relations to return to something like normal. In 1988 the two prime ministers, Rajiv Gandhi and Li Peng, agreed to set the border dispute to one side. Since then there have been 14 meetings of a joint working group set up to tackle it. Last year Zhu Rongji, then Chinese prime minister, came to India, and his Indian counterpart, Atal Behari Vajpayee, is repaying the visit this week—the first time an Indian prime minister has travelled to China since 1993. On many international issues—such as the war in Iraq—the two countries agree. Moreover, bilateral trade has grown from a paltry $338m in 1992 to nearly $5 billion in 2002. On the first day of Mr Vajpayee's visit, Indian and Chinese officials signed a series of agreements, including one easing visa rules and a Chinese promise of $500m for India's infrastructure. “We should focus on the simple truth that there is no objective reason for discord between us and neither of us is a threat to the other,” said Mr Vajpayee. The following day, India and China appointed envoys to resolve their long-running border dispute (China still refuses to recognise India’s incorporation of Sikkim in 1975 as a state of the Indian union) and India explicitly recognised Tibet as part of China, though it showed no sign of being prepared to hand over the Dalai Lama. At times, the mask of mutual respect slips. When India exploded a nuclear bomb in 1998, its defence minister, George Fernandes, let it be known that the arsenal was needed not so much because of Pakistan’s nuclear ambitions as because of the long-term threat from China. It was certainly true that India’s nuclear programme, started in the mid-1960s, was a response to its defeat in the 1962 war and to China’s acquisition of the bomb two years later. A widely held belief colours Indian analysis of China’s economic policies as well as its diplomacy: that Beijing has a grand and cunning plan, which survives all its political turmoil. Many Indian businessmen and policymakers react to evidence of China’s superior economic performance first with denial, and then with anger: China, it is well known, stir-fries its books, especially its GDP and investment numbers; India, suffering in comparison, is the victim of geopolitical statistical fraud. It is true that China’s figures are highly dubious. According to the official data, China received $52.7 billion of foreign direct investment (FDI) last year; India got just 4% of that amount, $2.3 billion. But Sadhana Srivastava, in an article in India’s Economic and Political Weekly, has recalculated both India’s and China’s figures for the year 2000 to make a fairer comparison. He found that China’s FDI fell by half, while India’s more than tripled. However, even on this basis, India was still attracting just 40% of the amount of foreign investment that went to China. Much of the gap is attributable to the activities of overseas Chinese—in Taiwan, Hong Kong, South-East Asia and America. They have ploughed far more of their money back into the motherland than have non-resident Indians, despite Indians’ economic success in many countries. Making things better Nor, statistical quibbling aside, can there be much argument about the relative pace of growth fuelled by such investment. China’s growth may be patchy, localised and exaggerated. But all the evidence of the senses suggests that it is far faster than India’s. That is especially true of industrial growth, and above all of manufacturing, which in 2002 made up just 15% of India’s GDP, compared with 35% of China’s. Indian manufacturers scratch their heads in bafflement at China’s ability to undercut them, usually blaming it on hidden support in the form of subsidised raw materials and soft credit. A recent report explained lower Chinese prices largely in terms of a tedious accumulation of minor cost disadvantages borne by Indian industry. The biggest, accounting for as much as half the difference, are sales and excise taxes, followed by the cost of capital. India’s much higher import duties—a trade-weighted average of around 24% compared with China’s 13%—also push up the cost of inputs. Policy changes could do much to help India catch up: cutting import duties; simplifying and cutting indirect taxes; reducing the list of industries “reserved” for small companies; easing labour laws to make hiring and firing and the use of contract workers easier. Indeed some of these reforms are already, slowly, under way, or at least under consideration. But almost all of them are politically difficult. The government has been loth to antagonise the many interest groups that have opposed reforms of one kind or another. Many Indians believe that a large part of the blame for their country’s inferior economic performance must be borne by the political system. China, the argument goes, is a dictatorship where the government and the businesses it favours can do what they want—change laws, build infrastructure, secure licences, fiddle their books—all without brooking any opposition. In India, however, not only does every step require dealing with an inept, corrupt and intrusive bureaucracy, but the democratic system itself also imposes extra costs and delays. For every important and helpful reform, there is a powerful lobby that will oppose it. Such a political comparison, however, contains many misperceptions. First, as those who have done business in China know, decision-making there is far more erratic and far more prone to profiteering by rent-seeking officials than it appears to some envious Indians. Second, much that holds India’s economy and businesses back has little to do with democracy as such: corruption, fiscal mismanagement, a lack of international ambition and a history of over-protection at home. Where India overcomes these obstacles, and has a clear competitive advantage—as in software and other information-technology services—it can be a huge success.