China and India are often compared as if they are two rising nation states. That is misleading. China is first and foremost a state that swallowed a civilisation. India is first and foremost a civilisation that still struggles to build a state around it. One is a spine in search of nerves and heart. The other is a sprawling nervous system that has never quite agreed on a single spine.
The Chinese state is the product of a very long Darwinian war. For nearly five centuries of the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods, dozens of kingdoms fought, reformed, died and were replaced. In that furnace emerged the Qin idea of the legalist, meritocratic state. Land was cut into prefectures. Governors were appointed not because of birth but because of performance. Armies were built on conscription and standardisation. Measurement, writing, currency, roads, canals, granaries, all were unified by decree.
The Qin did not last long, but their design did. The Han kept the empire even while denouncing Qin cruelty. Later dynasties oscillated between two poles: legalist meritocracy and Confucian patrimonialism. Confucianism put the family at the centre and treated the state as an extension of the morally brought-up household. Legalism insisted that the state had its own logic: law, bureaucracy, examinations, impersonal promotion by merit.
When the state leaned too far into families, court politics decayed into clan conspiracies and harem intrigues, as under Empress Wu. When it leaned too far into legalism, it turned into a machine for terror, as under the Ming eunuchs and their secret police. But through all these swings, one thing remained constant: the assumption that there must be one China, ruled from the centre, with the power to mobilise millions for war, walls, canals, dams and now high-speed trains.
This creates a peculiar strength and a peculiar weakness. The Chinese state can move mountains, divert rivers, and relocate entire cities. It can also crush dissent with remarkable efficiency. Power flows downward. Accountability, if it exists, flows only upward inside the apparatus. The citizen is expected to trust that the emperor, the party, the bureaucracy will correct itself. When it fails, the collapse is spectacular.
India followed the opposite path. Here, society hardened before the state could form. Varna and jati divided people into ritual roles long before anyone drew a modern border. Brahmins monopolised literacy and law, not land and arms. Kings and warriors wielded the sword but deferred to priests for legitimacy. Merchants and lower castes controlled much of the economic life, but could not easily cross ritual boundaries. Village communities operated as near-autonomous units, bound more by custom and caste than by royal edicts.
Foreign invaders saw this clearly. The Turkic sultans and the Mughal emperors rode in with cavalry and guns, but to rule they had to bargain with local chiefs, accommodate caste rules, respect religious specialists, and accept that Delhi could not reach every village. The Mughal court was rich, its armies deadly, but the social order beneath remained stubbornly local.
The British did something new. They drew a map that said “India” and administered it as a single colony, yet they kept the state deliberately weak. They ruled through princes, landlords and communities, codified religious personal laws instead of replacing them, and built courts and bureaucracies that were good at extraction but bad at service. They unified India in paper and railways, not in institutions.
Independent India inherited that weak, creaky state. The courts are slow. Bureaucracy is often opaque and corrupt. The state struggles to deliver basic services, infrastructure, education, health. But the society beneath is noisy, quarrelsome, and inventive. Regional parties rise and fall. Governments are voted out. Protest is a daily language. Families, castes, religious bodies, unions, movements all constantly negotiate with the state, block it, bend it, force it to respond.
So we end up with two mirror images. China: strong state, weak society. India: strong society, weak state. In China, the question is how to restrain the state without breaking it. In India, the question is how to strengthen the state without letting it trample society.
For China, the danger is familiar from its own history: a central power that becomes unaccountable, captured by a faction, imposing terror until rebellion resets the system at enormous cost. Legalist meritocracy works as long as the exam system, the party, the bureaucracy remain relatively clean and open; once clientelism and fear dominate, the machine devours its own legitimacy.
For India, the danger is different: a state so hemmed in by identity, patronage and local vetoes that it cannot build the roads, schools, courts and hospitals that a modern society needs. In such a system, the successful citizen survives not because the state is efficient, but in spite of it. Families and communities substitute for public goods. Inequality deepens. Those who can afford to exit, do so privately.