Order and Stability

How history shapes China’s present policies. An extract

China and India are often called ‘civilizational states’: modern nations that have risen out of thousands of years of civilizational knowledge and an ever-accumulating vault of treasures. But in many ways, China is the mirror image of all that India has ever been. By its very nature, Indian civilization had open borders and coastlines for centuries on end. It invited in the hodgepodge influence of cultures from all and sundry. They all came, ruled, and stayed in India—from the Greeks to the Central Asians, the Afghans, the Turks, and finally the British (who were, incidentally, the only ones to be asked to leave). Indian culture, languages, religious practices, society, and politics have all learnt and imbibed various elements from the rest of the world.

China, by contrast, has always had a tendency to centralize, unify and homogenize. The Han Chinese empire was among the first in the world to introduce a visa regime, some 2000 years ago. Delegations who visited the Han emperor travelled on fixed itineraries and were issued travel passes—often in such detail as to indicate the exact number of travellers and the towns they were allowed to visit. These were to be presented at multiple checkpoints along their route. There was also economic protectionism. For instance, scholars believe that although China likely discovered paper as early as before the Christian Era, the invention did not quite spread until the Arab conquest of Central Asia some 800 year later—most possibly because the Chinese kept papermaking a secret.

All this insularity means that China has long been a world within itself, rarely influenced by the outside world: Chinese culture and thought have developed more organically and intrinsically than India’s hodgepodge nation. A strong and centralized p