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The Compass: Chinese Dreams: Chinese Dreams: India

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Chinese Dreams: India

22/01/2020 GMT

Chinese Dreams

BBC World Service - The Compass, Chinese Dreams, Chinese Dreams: India

Where is the complicated relationship between India and China heading?

Many Indians love Chinese goods, but China is not as keen on what India makes. With a trade deficit between the countries at historic levels, where is the relationship heading?

India and China have a complex and troubled modern history – including a fully-fledged war in 1962. Today Indian consumers seem to love all things Chinese, from the cheap plastic toys to smartphones and apps like Tik Tok. Some Indians think this success is a result of unfair trade. They think that Chinese imports are taking advantage of the relatively open Indian economy, while Indian companies are prevented from getting a foothold in China. This creates a huge trade imbalance between the two Asian giants. These flames are fanned by Indian perceptions of Chinese support for both Pakistan and Kashmiri ‘separatists’.  An affiliate of the governing BJP party has called on consumers to boycott Chinese goods. And India has refused to sign a regional economic trade agreement to prevent China using it as a backdoor to the Indian market. Shabnam Grewal, a British BBC journalist of Indian descent, investigates the complex feelings that Indians have towards their increasingly rich and powerful neighbour – a combination of admiration, envy and even anger.

Producer: Shabnam Grewal
Editor: Hugh Levinson

(Photo: Chinese President Xi Jinping and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Credit: Kenzaburo Fukuhara/AFP/Getty Images)

The Compass: Chinese Dreams

How countries across the world are responding to the rise of China.

In nation after nation, one issue has risen up the political agenda – often becoming a national obsession. The rise of China, and the ensuring benefits and harms of its influence, has become a contentious issue across every continent. This series looks at how Chinese power – whether economic, political or ideological - is affecting individual countries across the globe. As it has grown richer, China has inevitably worked to protect its economic and political interests, through creating alliances with governments and spreading its own values.
 
Many nations, especially poorer ones, have benefited from massive investment in roads, rail, ports and factories. They have also ridden a boom in sales of raw materials and agricultural products to the fast expanding Chinese market. China has provided a model of economic development which has been copied and adapted by other emerging economics, especially in Asia. Yet there has often been resentment: at material factors like floods of cheap Chinese imports, of exploitative and opaque deals, shoddy construction and the arrival of Chinese migrant workers. And there are deeper concerns: about undue influence on – even the subversion of - politicians and policy makers: the spreading of a Chinese-patterned ideology and a downplaying of human rights: and efforts to paint a rosy picture of China and to suppress criticism. In these five episodes, The Compass takes a clear-eyed view of how China’s money and power are influencing debate within five very different nations.

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