The Pulse | Society | South Asia

Why India Does Not Interest China

The Chinese see Indians as not having absorbed the lessons that China did from its humiliation at the hands of the West.

Northern Indian, Sri Lankan, and Central Indian envoys depicted in a Tang Dynasty-era painting of foreign emissaries to the Tang court by Yan Liben, China, circa 7th century.

When the Chinese Buddhist monk Faxian traveled to India during the Gupta era over 1,600 years ago, he described what he saw as a sort of paradise:

The inhabitants are prosperous and happy. There are no Boards of Population and Revenue. Those only who farm the Royal demesnes pay a portion of the produce as rent. Nor are they bound to remain in possession longer than they like. The King in the administration of justice, inflicts no corporal punishment; but each culprit is fined in money according to the gravity of his offence; and even in cases where the culprit has been guilty of repeated attempts to excite rebellion, they merely have their right hands cut off. The chief officers of the king have all fixed salaries.

The inhabitants are prosperous and happy. There are no Boards of Population and Revenue. Those only who farm the Royal demesnes pay a portion of the produce as rent. Nor are they bound to remain in possession longer than they like. The King in the administration of justice, inflicts no corporal punishment; but each culprit is fined in money according to the gravity of his offence; and even in cases where the culprit has been guilty of repeated attempts to excite rebellion, they merely have their right hands cut off. The chief officers of the king have all fixed salaries.

 The recent science-fiction novel “The Three-Body Problem” is one of China’s most popular global exports, and a leading exemplar of Sinofuturism, a genre that explores the way in which China will lead the world economically, politically, and technologically in the future. Yet, India, one of a small handful of countries to successfully launch a satellite to the moon, does not feature at all in China’s most prominent work of futurism, in which China cooperates with the Russians, Europeans, Japanese, and Americans to combat an alien threat.

This encapsulates the dramatic shift in how India is viewed in the Chinese imagination, going from being a holy land to a place not even worth mentioning when considering the future. Today, the Chinese generally are indifferent, if not contemptuous, toward India.

This shift is not merely a function of modern geopolitical tensions. By the end of the Tang dynasty in 907 CE, Buddhism had assimilated into Chinese culture and Confucianism was resurgent, reinforcing China’s notion of its centrality. There was less reason for Chinese polities and people to idolize India. The historian Tansen Sen noted that the tenth century was a “watershed in connections between India and China” because interactions between the two “shifted from those that were dominated by Buddhism to exchanges that were fostered through commercial contacts.” When the Chinese admiral Zheng He sailed to southern India in the early 15th century, he treated many local kingdoms as Chinese tributaries.

Contemporary Chinese attitudes toward India are mostly shaped by the experience of the past 200 years. Many Chinese see India’s history as a........

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