Anti-India business sentiment
Source: By Hemant Adlakha: The Indian Express
External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar recently said that India’s economic relationship with China is “very unfair and very unbalanced”, as “we don’t have the same market access there, while they have much better market access in India.” Jaishankar was speaking at the Global Centre for Security Policy in Geneva earlier in September.
India has a growing trade deficit with China. Chinese imports surpassed $100 billion in FY24, while India’s exports barely crossed $16 billion in the last financial year.
However, increasingly, public sentiment seems to be rising in China against doing business with India. Why has this happened, and what are sections of the Chinese public saying?
Many Indians, including students studying in China, are often surprised by the negative portrayal of India in the Chinese media. However, to understand the opinion of the common Chinese public, social media can be an interesting window.
Chinese social media is a vibrant and lively arena where users freely comment on major international affairs, and India and Indians feature frequently.
Beijing-based media professional Mu Chunshan, who has been reporting and analysing foreign affairs for over two decades, believes that while in general, the Chinese have no malice towards India, the border dispute between the neighbours is a sticking point.
“The Chinese perception is that India has besieged and contained China with the support of the West, joining the Quad for this purpose. However, while most Chinese people do not like to see India get too close to the United States, they believe under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, India can maintain a balance among major countries in the world, including Russia, the United States, and the Global South.”
Many Chinese netizens look at Indians with envy, for they believe most Indians have a happy-go-lucky attitude towards life whereas the Chinese are always griping. No wonder that Bollywood movies like Dangal, 3 Idiots, Bajrangi Bhaijaan, etc. grossed millions of dollars in China.
Other things many Chinese appreciate is that Indian billionaires seem richer than China’s, most Indian women seem to have a golden bracelet or earring to flaunt, and India is doing very well in its Mars programme. India’s high rape statistics and the caste system, however, do come in for frequent condemnation.
‘Hostile attitude towards China’
Amid these broad trends, recently, in experts’ opinions, social media comments, and the ‘letter to the editor’ sections of news portals, there’s a renewed debate on whether or not to decouple the economy of China from India, especially making investments in India. The debate was heightened after a recent report in Bloomberg that China had asked its carmakers not to export their EV technology.
In China, the popular digital news daily guancha.cn carried an article titled ‘Don’t export industrial capacity to India’, by Ning Nanshan. The article claimed that in the past three-four years, the Indian government has been “victimising” and “harassing” several Chinese companies operating in India, including Xiaomi, OPPO, Vivo, etc. It also mentioned the ban on Chinese apps and businesses like TikTok in India.
If we look at the Chinese readers’ views and comments on this article, they can be divided into two categories.
One set of opinions is critical of the attitude and approach of Chinese businesses overseas in general. “There is still no strict control and review mechanism for Chinese companies’ overseas investment and exports. Europeans and Americans do not believe in an absolute free market economy, but the Chinese are still fooled into believing in it. Is this dereliction of duty?” one reader wrote.
Or consider this, “There are some leaders of state-owned enterprises in China who only consider their personal achievements, and some private capitalists [in China] who only see profits, are full of unstoppable desires and greed. In their eyes, short-term profits are more important than anything else”; “China must resolutely put an end to technology exports in the fields of automobiles, new energy technologies, high-speed rail, etc. The government must regulate from the legislative level.”
The other set of opinions is specifically targeting India. Many Chinese are convinced that if “we export industrial capabilities to India and help India build infrastructure and industrial chains, that would mean we are helping India and the US join forces to damage our own industrial supply chain.”
