August 13, 2026
Suppose a piece of equipment malfunctions and you take it to a technician in India. He will probably tell you to return a few days later. When you do, you can be reasonably certain that it will not have been repaired.
You return a few days later, and then perhaps again and again. On your third, fourth, or fifth visit, the technician may finally hand the equipment back, supposedly repaired. Somewhere during your visits, to escape your pestering, he might have claimed that the work took longer because there were more problems than anticipated even though you can see that your equipment wasn't even touched given the dust that had accumulated on it. You will not only have visited repeatedly; you may also be asked to pay more.
When you test the equipment, however, you discover either that the original problem has not been fully corrected or that the repair has created entirely new problems.
While you are trying to explain yourself, he is constantly distracted, dealing with several other irate customers like you and confusing your problem with theirs. Everyone grows increasingly impatient, louder, and more exasperated.
You point out what is wrong. To an objective observer, the defect is obvious. Yet the technician may flatly refuse to recognize it-or seemingly fail to understand what you are talking about. He might even suggest that you take the equipment home, let things settle down, and see whether the problem somehow sorts itself out.
If you discover the problems after you have taken it away, the technician will pass all the blame to you, calling it newly created.
You can, of course, go somewhere else. But your experience is unlikely to be much different-and the devil you know is preferable to the one you do not.
This has to be experienced to be believed. Even I begin to doubt that it really happens once I have been away from India for a few months.
So common is this experience in India that one struggles to think of exceptions. Anyone who has spent enough time there will have his own collection of similar stories. Nor is it merely about technicians. Their customers belong to the same society and are the other side of the same coin. The pattern appears in dealings with government offices, private companies, professionals, contractors, and even friends and family. Life becomes a constant stream of firefighting and brain damage: following up, reminding people, correcting what was supposedly corrected, and keeping track of the never-ending accumulation of unfinished work.
This is not merely a problem of technical competence. It reflects something deeper: a fragile relationship, individually and socially, with objectivity, quality, responsibility, and truth. A promise to finish the work in a few days is not necessarily understood as a statement about future reality; it may simply be something convenient to say at that particular moment. Whether the equipment actually works can become similarly negotiable.
The distinction may sound trivial, but it explains a great deal about why some societies work and others do not.
When trying to understand the future of a country, one should not be particularly interested in its elites or exceptionally successful people. They are outliers. They tell us what extraordinary intelligence, creativity, ambition, luck, selection, or circumstance can produce, and perhaps something about investment opportunities available from working with them. But statistically they tell us little about the society as a whole.
The essence of a society is better understood in its small towns, isolated communities, workshops, farms, churches, diners, and ordinary households-in the behavior of people whose names will never appear in a newspaper. Creative, entrepreneurial-and indeed crooked-people do not exist in a vacuum. They emerge from, or find their way into, a much larger ecology that can either nourish or suffocate creativity, openness, fairness, loyalty, honor, trust, and responsibility. The general population is the reservoir of values, supplying the moral nutrients from which enterprise, trust, responsibility, and the entrepreneurial spirit grow.
In backward societies, it is not always easy to distinguish success produced by competence from that produced by corruption, connections, or political patronage. Nor can such societies be understood by attending conferences, mixing with the rich and famous, staying in expensive hotels, and going to fancy parties. These experiences may leave you with a euphoric but badly distorted impression of the country. Geopolitical analysts and investors make this mistake all the time.
If India, comprising nearly a fifth of humanity, produces a handful of CEOs of major American companies, what exactly does that prove ? The same applies when the relatively high incomes of Indians in the United States are cited as evidence of what Indians as a whole are capable of. Many of India's most capable, educated, and ambitious people have left the country and operate inside Western institutions that are themselves products of Western culture. This is hardly a like-for-like comparison. Does their success demonstrate the competence of Indian society-or the openness, hospitality, and institutional quality of American society ? Yet people routinely extrapolate from the cream of India to what Indians in general would supposedly achieve if transplanted to America.
What interests me is the ordinary person.
How does the mechanic repair a machine ? How does a clerk deal with someone who has no influence ? What happens when an employee makes a mistake ? Does he conceal it, argue about it, blame someone else-or correct it ? Does anyone take ownership of a problem ? Does a promise mean anything?
One should walk the streets, sit in coffee shops, take a bus to a nearby village for a meal, and watch how the taxi driver conducts himself. Do locals see a foreigner and try to extract whatever they can from him, or do they extend a helping hand ? How do people behave when there is no reward for behaving well and no punishment for behaving badly?
These mundane encounters reveal the habits, assumptions, and moral emotions on which institutions ultimately rest. Most travelers pay little attention to them. They should.
And this is where the difference between India and China becomes enormous.
For the last five years, I have owned a cellphone from a Chinese manufacturer. I have taken it several times to the company's service centers in China for repairs.
The experiences have been almost absurdly inexpensive, and every technician I have dealt with has been thoroughly competent and adroit with his hands. On one occasion, the battery was replaced without charge because the company regarded the problem as a possible manufacturing defect-this despite my telling them that the phone had once fallen into a swimming pool. Broken glass was repaired without charge even when the phone was well outside warranty, and screen protectors have routinely been replaced for free.
Whenever I was told to return in an hour or two, the work was done when I returned, usually better than I had expected.
During my most recent visit, however, something went wrong. The repair had created several new problems, probably because something had been connected incorrectly during reassembly.
Of course, mistakes happen. Chinese technicians are not infallible. Chinese bureaucrats can be incompetent. Chinese institutions can malfunction. That is not the distinction I am making.
The distinction became apparent when I showed the technician what had gone wrong.
My Indian scars had kicked in. Somewhere inside me I expected defensiveness. I expected her to tell me that there was nothing wrong with the phone, that I had caused the problem myself, or that I should take it away and return another day, leaving me in limbo. The language barrier made me even less optimistic. She knew essentially no English, and my Chinese is seriously deficient.
She looked at the phone and immediately acknowledged that the problems existed. She did not deny even those that were minor or difficult to demonstrate. She did not pretend that I was imagining them or treat me as an irritating customer who needed to be made to disappear. She accepted reality and took ownership.
Her supervisor became involved to understand what had gone wrong. He took over the repair, completely disassembled the phone, and rebuilt it.
It was kaizen in its most mundane form: find the defect, accept that it exists, determine its cause, and correct it. No time was wasted on excuses, protecting egos, or belittling anyone.
A couple of hours later, the phone was returned to me as good as new. The cost was RMB35, around US$5.
The important part of this story is not that the original repair failed. Failure happens everywhere. What matters is the response once failure becomes visible.
Such incidents may look small, but they are not. They reveal the moral habits on which complex societies depend: ownership of error, pride in workmanship, responsiveness to the customer, and the willingness to correct a problem rather than hide it.
These are not merely technical skills. They are civilizational emotions in action.
A complex society depends on millions of people whose work continually intersects with that of others and cannot be individually supervised. Tiny compromises may be invisible and impossible to trace back to the person who made them, but they accumulate and compound. So do tiny acts of conscientiousness. Over time, they determine whether a society works.
Most experiences in life are too subtle to make this visible so clearly.
Once, in China, late in the evening, I accidentally stabbed myself in the hand. The cut was not serious, but shops were closed, and I needed it cleaned and dressed. With nowhere else to go, I walked into the emergency department of a private hospital, assuming that I would at least have to pay the minimum charge simply for entering the emergency room.
A nurse immediately cleaned the wound, dressed it, and, almost without looking at me, moved on. I have often found Chinese people almost uncomfortable with being thanked or offered a tip. The matter was apparently considered too minor to justify charging for it.
On another occasion, elsewhere in China, I went to a government-run military hospital because of a sports injury. As soon as I entered, a young woman approached me and took responsibility for getting me to the right place. I was eventually taken to a senior orthopedic specialist.
The consultation cost RMB10, around US$1.50.
Obviously, this was a subsidized price. What interested me was that I was a foreigner and nobody cared. There was no attempt to create a separate foreigner price, invent an administrative difficulty, or extract whatever could be extracted from someone unfamiliar with the system.
Contrast this with the anxiety with which an ordinary Indian approaches healthcare.
Private medical treatment can become extraordinarily expensive. Incentives for unnecessary tests and procedures are considerable, reinforced by financial arrangements among referrals, diagnostic centers, pharmacies, and medical providers that shift attention away from the patient. Worse, one cannot always be confident that the "doctor" one is consulting is actually trained in modern medicine, even in a better-known hospital; practitioners trained in traditional medicine can be found working even in intensive-care settings.
Public hospitals present a different problem: overcrowding, disorder, and uncertainty about how to obtain attention in the first place. The dysfunction is so severe that even very poor Indians often stretch themselves financially to seek private treatment.
Walk into a government hospital and you may find a mass of people extending toward the entrance, with no obvious system for getting initial attention. You push your way into the crowd and wait for hours, perhaps an entire day or night, without knowing when-or whether-someone will attend to you. When someone finally does, you will be abused, belittled, or brushed off without a proper examination.
I have no competence in navigating such a system. Even those of us who end up in a government hospital merely to gain access to specialized equipment unavailable elsewhere may have to use political connections or bribes, as I once did. In my experience, even equipment provided free by foreign aid organizations could become effectively reserved for those with connections to the ruling class, forming part of an economy of favors.
When I lived in Delhi, a colleague had her knee crushed by an Indian Army truck. The nearest hospital was an Indian Army hospital. Despite the emergency-and despite the Army itself being responsible for the accident-she was not even given first aid.
Again, the difference is not that China has no bad hospitals or incompetent doctors. It is that, in my experience, the ordinary institutional instinct is far more often directed toward solving the problem placed in front of it.
In China today, my experience is increasingly that someone takes ownership of the problem. Often, someone approaches you almost as soon as you enter, finds out what you need, identifies who is responsible, directs you to that person, and tries to move you through the system.
In an Indian government office, the first seemingly impossible task is to discover who is responsible. Then you must discover where he is. He is unlikely to be at his desk. When you eventually find him, you must deal with his arrogance, his god complex, and his need to make you genuflect, beg, and prostrate yourself before him. He sends you somewhere else, that person sends you to another, and you go around in circles.
Eventually, you zero in on someone who might be responsible, his ego now inflated by the realization that he vaguely holds the power. In India, nobody is ever fully responsible, so one must proceed carefully.
Then the dance around the bribe begins.
Paying is not enough; you must strategize. You cannot tell the bureaucrat that you distrust him, even though he knows perfectly well that you should. Trust him too much and he will take you for a fool. Everything must be wrapped in euphemism and pretense.
Pay the wrong person and you lose the money. Even paying the right person creates no obligation to complete the work. You must work out who actually has power and what combination of money, deference, persistence, and connections might make the machinery move.
Over time, the scale and shamelessness of bribery in India have increased. In the past, euphemisms were still necessary-the gift for his children, for example. Today, bureaucrats speak openly about their collections. The amount collected can itself become a mark of status, even enhancing one's value in the marriage market.
I cannot remember dealing with an Indian bureaucracy without paying a bribe. Nor is there any recourse: go higher up, and you encounter a more expensive level of the same system.
Those unaccustomed to corruption often fail to appreciate its corrosiveness. It does not merely add another cost to government; it destroys the purpose of whatever institution, law, or scheme it infects.
Whatever one thinks of the Chinese Communist Party or Xi Jinping, petty corruption appears to have largely disappeared from the everyday life of the ordinary Chinese person, although admittedly my scope of interaction as a visitor is limited. Even Chinese who are highly critical of Xi have told me that they have not paid a bribe in years.
The one recurring exception I hear about concerns admission to the best government-run schools. There, influence and payments may still move through chains of personal connections: your contact knows someone who knows someone who can reach the person who matters.
But even that comparison is revealing. In India, even a janitor earning barely enough to survive may struggle to send her children to a private school because government schools often exist more convincingly on paper than in educational reality, producing certificates without necessarily producing literacy.
On one occasion, I went to a police station in China for some administrative work. The policewoman dealing with me was cold and unhelpful. Frustrated, I took down her details and walked out.
Before I could get away, her superior came running after me, brought me back, and made sure that my work was completed. They clearly understood that there could be consequences if I complained, even if she herself had been apathetic.
I could not avoid thinking about how differently such an act might unfold in India.
An ordinary Indian would think very carefully before openly recording the details of a policeman with whom he was having a dispute. The citizen is expected to display fear, not confidence. Police authority is often experienced as personal rather than institutional, and retaliation can range from harassment and fabricated accusations to custodial violence.
In China, by contrast, I regularly see ordinary people look bureaucrats in the eye, argue with them, become angry with them, and sometimes shout at them.
China is certainly not a liberal society in the Western sense, nor am I suggesting that its institutions are transparent or free of arbitrary power. But that is not the comparison I am making here. I am comparing everyday functioning in China and India-two large, non-Western societies that imported many of the same tools of modernity and produced radically different results. Yet in everyday encounters, the relationship between the ordinary citizen and the local official can be strikingly freer from harassment than in supposedly democratic India.
I once asked a Chinese woman who was critical of Beijing why government officers did not seem to flaunt their power more often. Her response was as revealing as anything she might have said about politics: "Why would they be heavy-handed?"
The question itself seemed strange to her.
It reminded me of another conversation, this time with a young Chinese woman. I asked her what kind of sexual harassment women commonly faced. Her immediate response was, "Why would anyone harass you?"
What interested me was the instinct behind the answers. The abuse of power I had come to expect did not seem, to them, the natural starting point. Their question was essentially the reverse of mine: why would someone behave that way in the first place?
Had I asked an Indian-man or woman-the same questions, it would have opened a can of worms. Each would have stories enough to fill volumes. In India, even the smallest amount of authority is treated as something to be displayed.
There is another aspect of China that I have only recently begun to appreciate: how remarkably low the frictional costs of ordinary economic life have become.
Historically, when traveling to China, I would bring certain American products with me, assuming that they would either be unavailable there or more expensive. Recently, I had to order within China and was dumbfounded to discover that exactly the same products were cheaper there than at Costco in the United States.
The same applies to financial transactions. If you walk into a bank in many countries wanting to convert US dollars into another currency, the effective spread can easily run to several percent. In China, I routinely encounter spreads of around 0.3 percent.
Chinese middlemen seem content to work on wafer-thin margins and make their money through volume. Perhaps this is one of the less appreciated keys to Chinese economic success: frictional, transactional, and administrative costs are remarkably low. In most countries, what initially looks cheap often reveals hidden costs. China is one of the rare places where, for what you get and at the quality provided, things can genuinely be inexpensive.
Every intermediary adding another margin, every bureaucrat delaying a permit, every employee requiring repeated follow-up, every unnecessary form, every bribe, every defective repair requiring another visit, and every promise that must be checked imposes a tax on economic life. Individually these costs may appear trivial. Collectively they can consume an enormous proportion of a society's productive energy.
China has spent decades squeezing these frictions out of everyday life. India seems to manufacture them.
India has an independent judiciary in constitutional form. China does not have judicial independence in the Western conception.
If one knows only institutional labels, India should therefore possess the superior legal system.
But what does judicial independence mean to the ordinary person if his case takes decades-and quite possibly never reaches a meaningful conclusion ? Indian court hearings are nothing more than occasions on which another date is assigned. A visit to court involves bribing several layers of the machinery surrounding the judge, and this is done with extraordinary openness-including payments to the policeman in the courtroom and to the clerk responsible for assigning the next hearing date, right in front of the judge. Later, the judge needs to be paid.
And then there is the lawyer.
Even if you manage to find a seemingly reasonable one-no easy task-you may discover that his incentives are scarcely aligned with yours. Collusion between opposing lawyers can be treated with remarkable casualness.
A wealthy Indian friend, having failed to find a decent lawyer, told his lawyer that he did not mind if the lawyer took money from the opposing side, provided the case was never actually decided. Endless litigation suited both him and his lawyer perfectly. His opponent would continue bleeding money, time, and emotional energy simply by remaining trapped in the process.
By explicitly allowing his own lawyer to take money from the opposing side, my friend was effectively shifting part of his legal cost onto his opponent. The opponent was now paying not only his own lawyer but, indirectly, my friend's as well.
In India, one learns the true meaning of dystopia.
People I know who have had ordinary commercial dealings with Chinese courts describe something very different: decisions generally arrive quickly, access is inexpensive, and bribery is not part of the process.
I have been traveling through China repeatedly for about two decades, often several times a year and sometimes for extended periods. What strikes me most is not where China is at any particular moment but its direction.
I have written elsewhere about some of the changes I have watched unfold in China over those years.
Twenty years ago, I remember seeing dead animals floating in Chinese rivers. Pollution was severe, and the air in many cities was unpleasant. Each time I return, however, the surroundings have improved. Rivers that once carried waste now have people fishing in them, and in most Chinese cities I no longer worry much about what I am breathing.
During my most recent visit to India, I found myself choking on the pollution. My throat and eyes continued to itch for days after I had left.
China industrialized on an enormous scale and then progressively cleaned up much of the environmental damage that accompanied it. India suffers some of the world's worst urban pollution despite having failed to achieve anything remotely comparable in manufacturing. Manufacturing's share of GDP remains stuck in the mid-teens and has, if anything, declined over the longer term. So much for the endlessly repeated story of manufacturing moving from China to India.
Again, the issue is not where either country started. It is the direction in which it is moving.
The movement has been remarkably consistent. China corrects. I cannot make the same observation about India. Much that was dysfunctional when I was young remains dysfunctional today, except that there are more people, more vehicles, more paperwork, more technology, and far more-and more shameless-corruption.
Notwithstanding India's massive reported economic growth, much of which I regard as fictitious, the employment situation continues to deteriorate. India's demographics are not an asset but a massive liability-not just for India but potentially for the world: a vast population with little education, few skills, weak values, and low productivity, with whatever productive capacity does exist further dissipated through corruption, bureaucracy, and the enormous frictional costs of everyday life.
Instead of confronting this problem, the Indian regime has increasingly preferred to distract the population by agitating it along religious and other tribal lines. This will come back to haunt India sooner than many expect. China, rather than worrying primarily about a future armed conflict with India, may eventually have something very different on its plate: millions of people moving north as India's demographic, economic, and social stresses intensify.
In every modern economy, only a minority of the population works in advanced manufacturing or other highly productive activities. Vast numbers remain in low-productivity retail, delivery work, routine services, and the gig economy.
Compared to India, China has a seemingly different demographic problem: a falling population. But population numbers alone tell us little about productive capacity. China still has an enormous reservoir of people who can move into higher-value work as automation replaces lower-value tasks. On a recent visit to a mid-sized Chinese city, I saw drone stations-rather like EV-charging stations-being installed. Delivery work that currently employs enormous numbers of people is already beginning to migrate toward drones.
China therefore does not require an endlessly increasing population. It needs to keep increasing the productivity and competence of the population it already has. I see little evidence that the coming generation lacks the capacity to do so. I have often found young Chinese commercially alert, technologically sophisticated, creative, and more willing to question authority than young Japanese or Singaporeans.
Nor does China see any obvious reason to compensate for population decline by importing large numbers of culturally incompatible outsiders. Its emphasis remains on automation, technological development, and fuller use of its existing human capital. Here it has resisted the Western prescription of using immigration to make up the numbers. Immigration may postpone some effects of population decline, but it does not remove the underlying demographic problem and creates massive cultural and social problems of its own.
The movement of people themselves is also revealing. A large proportion of Chinese who study abroad return home. India presents almost the reverse picture: the outward flow appears constrained less by Indians' desire to leave than by the willingness of other countries to admit them.
Across the West, educational institutions have emerged whose appeal to many Indian students lies as much in providing a foothold for immigration as in the education itself. And the flow is hardly confined to students: Indians seek routes out through employment, family sponsorship, and other forms of migration.
Migration is ultimately a form of revealed preference. Whatever people may say about their country, where they choose to build their lives tells us something about where they expect opportunity, order, and a future to be found.
These mundane interactions are upstream of GDP. They reveal whether a society possesses the habits necessary to maintain a complex civilization.
China has increasingly learned to make correction cumulative. India does the reverse: dysfunction compounds, often negating the benefits that modern technology might otherwise have brought.
China did not generate most of the philosophical and technological foundations of modern civilization. Much of that came from the West. But importing something is only the beginning. A society must be capable of absorbing it. China possessed enough of the necessary habits-discipline, shame, order, practical seriousness, pride in workmanship, and respect for competence-to absorb what worked, maintain it, refine it, and eventually improve upon it.
India imported many of the same technologies and institutional forms without acquiring the habits that make them work. A deadline matters only if a promise means something. Quality control works only if a defect is recognized as a defect. Accountability requires an internal discomfort with failure. Rules work only when people respect their purpose even when nobody is watching.
In today's world, technology and technical knowledge move across borders almost frictionlessly. Machinery can be bought, software downloaded, procedures copied, consultants hired, and institutions reproduced on paper. What cannot be imported so easily is the human substrate on which all of this depends.
This is why India is not merely twenty or thirty years behind China. That description assumes that both societies are traveling along the same road, with one simply farther ahead. They are not. The gap is civilizational, not technological.
India can acquire ever more advanced technology and still reproduce the same dysfunction around it. Closing that gap would require a transformation in the moral and cultural foundations of everyday life-a process measured, if it happens at all, not in development plans or election cycles but across generations, perhaps centuries.
Technology can be transferred in an afternoon.