This understanding of history, and this vision of China as an industrial powerhouse, gives rise to a few special characteristics of the Chinese economy.

Focus on the Real Economy

Peter Thiel has mourned Western civilisation's focus on "bits over atoms". As he has said: "We live in a financial and capitalist age, not a scientific or technological age." Or his more famous observation: "We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters."

Xi Jinping has understood this at a civilisational level. On a 2023 inspection tour of Jiangsu province, he declared that the real economy is the foundation of a country's economy, the fundamental source of wealth creation, and an important pillar of national strength. He has repeatedly described financialisation as the "fictitious economy" and contrasted it with the "real economy" of manufactured products.

State-affiliated researchers routinely denounce the hollowing out of manufacturing and financialisation in the same breath.

Xi has put a leash on digital platforms, cracked down on financialisation, and refused to let industry hollow out in pursuit of paper returns. America has gone the other way. A civilisation that once put men on the moon is now running prediction markets on absurd questions like "whether Jesus will return before 2027". This is a symbol of what happens when a society loses the habit of making things and starts making money off everything instead.

Completionism

Xi has declared a doctrine of completionism: China must never deindustrialise, not even in low-end industries. He does not want production to follow economic logic and migrate to lower-cost countries. He refuses to let industry shift out. It is strategically deliberate.

A country that retains all 419 categories of industrial production tracked by the United Nations retains the process knowledge, the workforce, and the supply chains to manufacture anything it needs — including weapons — in a crisis. China added more coal-burning capacity in 2023 than the rest of the world combined. It prefers energy self-sufficiency over a focus on climate change. It would rather burn domestic coal than import Middle Eastern oil. Xi prefers his industry heavy and his output hard.

What Stops India from Being a Great Power?

While reading the book, I was continuously thinking about what I could label the Indian state as. It lacks China's ruthless capacity to build without consent. It has the lawyerly society's capacity for obstruction without America's underlying wealth to absorb the cost. We have built a system very good at stopping things and not particularly interested in building them.

Why has India struggled to become a great power despite having the talent and the demography? Why has it failed at building infrastructure, a manufacturing base, or state capacity? These questions require being honest about several issues.

The Absence of Historical Memory and Strategic Vision

Wang identifies a crucial thread running through every Chinese leader since the Qing emperors who lost the Opium Wars: a burning civilisational awareness of why China fell behind, and a determination that it will never happen again.

Xi clearly states his technology agenda as a response to the historical humiliation China faced from Western ships and cannons. The declaration that China must become a science and technology superpower by 2035 is the expression of a lesson drawn from history. The Chinese leadership knows what it lacks, knows why it lacked it, and has organised its state around never lacking it again.

India has no equivalent historical memory embedded in its governing class. The intellectual frameworks that dominated our elite after 1947 — Gandhian self-sufficiency, Nehruvian socialism, the romantic valorisation of the village economy — never asked honestly why India was conquered and held for hundreds of years. The answer, which Chinese leaders grasped intuitively, is technology, industrial capacity, and organised state power. A nation that does not understand why it was weak cannot build lasting strength.

India has no coherent vision for the future either. It has no coherent intellectual movement arguing, as China's online thinkers do, that nation-states ruthlessly compete, that science and technology are the decisive forces, and that the state must organise itself accordingly. Instead, our public discourse is dominated by debates about reservations, secularism, and appeasement. These are all real issues, but none of them will determine whether India becomes a great power in the coming decades.

Getting Democracy Early: The Curse of the Lowest Common Denominator

India became a democracy before it became an industrialised nation. This sequence matters enormously, and it has received less serious examination than it deserves.

England, France, Germany, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore all industrialised before they democratised fully — or, in some cases, industrialised under authoritarian governments wearing democratic garb. China is industrialising under authoritarian rule. The historical pattern is consistent: states build industrial capacity when a small elite can direct resources without requiring consensus at every step.

Satendra Thakur

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