Why China got rich and India didn't

The article didn’t mention what I think is the single most important reason: the ability to align local governments with the central government.

You can design the best policies in the world, but it’s local governments that actually implement them.

The Great Chinese Famine was a prime example of this. Mao became the scapegoat, but he wasn’t as detached from reality or as blindly idealistic as many people make him out to be. His mistake was treating local governments the way he treated the military - giving them significant autonomy, making them compete and trusting the information they reported back to him.

It turned out that politicians were far more corrupt than military generals. Local officials lied about food production and greatly exaggerated output figures to gain promotions. As a result, the country sold more grain than it actually had, contributing to widespread famine and millions of deaths.

When Deng returned to power and began reforming the country, he famously toured China city by city to ensure that local governments understood the message and stop fk around this time.

To outsiders, it may seem that China can move quickly simply because the central government holds a great deal of power. That is certainly true compared with many other systems of governance. However, what really enables rapid policy implementation is the alignment between the central and local governments. Without that alignment, you would see the central government issue one policy but local government adds lots of red tapes and nothing really gets done in the end

> India's central government, unlike the Chinese, cannot unilaterally execute national plans.

They don’t have the appetite to be socially modern anyway. Every Indian passport still has the holder’s parents’ name within (in Indian bureaucracy your parents seem to essentially own you regardless of age), which as TFA contends ties them to a social unit in a way that hampers the fungibility needed for smooth industrialization. Is it possible to argue that the central government doesn’t control even the passport it issues itself? It’s obvious that the motivation is simply absent, same as it was nearly a hundred years ago.

There is no singular decisive answer. Sure, you can chalk all of it up to "wrong" policy, but peel the layers a bit and explore the causes behind them and you'll see an endless chain of cause-and-effect covering more factors than all schools of academia can feasibly cover.

India never had that choice, because forced order in the magnitude of China is practically impossible for the country for a vast variety of reasons too many to list down. Suffice to say there can be no comparison between PRC's federal admin that holds absolute power over every inch of its territory, and India's that barely survives each year.

For India, the choice was either an endless cycle of balkanization, bloodshed and anarchy à la Sub-Saharan Africa with a mild possibility of some of the states eventually thriving economically, or an inherited weak but held-together nation-state with a bit more negotiating power in the world stage.