The ghost of China haunts every conversation about India. When U.S. Deputy Secretary Christopher Landau visited New Delhi earlier this year, he stated it directly: “We are not going to make the same mistakes with India that we made with China 20 years ago…” Now, as Secretary of State Marco Rubio heads to New Delhi for his first official visit since taking office, the China comparison will follow him into every meeting. Washington backed a rising Asian giant before, the argument goes, and got burned. Why should India be any different?
That fear may be intuitive for Americans, but it gets the lesson of China exactly backwards – and risks further benefiting Beijing. The lesson of China is not to distrust every rising power. It is to distinguish between those that seek to overturn the international order and those likely to strengthen it. And India, whatever its imperfections, has every reason to want the current system to endure.
The China Mirage
With the advantage of hindsight, far greater skepticism was warranted the last time a large Asian civilization-state with a rapidly expanding economy sought Western support to accelerate its rise. Washington’s faith in globalization allowed Beijing to hollow out the American industrial base, sustained by the expectation that a wealthier China would naturally turn democratic and support global stability. Beijing’s revisionist ambitions were consistently overlooked in favor of market access: its aggressive actions across the Indo-Pacific, exploitation of the World Trade Organization, vast intellectual property theft and espionage, and regular bouts of wolf-warrior diplomacy all went unreckoned with so long as the commercial relationship held.
The failure of the China bet could not be clearer today. Not only did China fail to liberalize domestically or become a partner in strengthening the international order, but it developed into the most formidable economic and political adversary the United States has ever faced, all while eroding the West’s capacity to respond. The mismanagement of China’s rise has produced the defining geopolitical challenge of this generation.
A growing number of observers fear India will follow the same trajectory. Given China’s demonstrated strategic leverage from manufacturing strength, India’s ambitions to build a rival industrial base look conspicuous. The muscular rule of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, along with his party’s intentions to further centralize power through election reorganization and by exerting greater control over states raise eyebrows. New Delhi’s purported assassination of a Sikh separatist in Canada – and an attempted one in the U.S. – combined with its more aggressive nuclear brinksmanship with Pakistan strike many Western observers as concerning signs of what India’s ascent means for the fraying rules-based international order.
A Different Tradition
But there is a meaningful difference between becoming a more assertive power within the international system and seeking to overturn it. The primary threats to today’s world order bear unmistakable resemblance to their historical predecessors. Xi’s China, Khamenei’s Iran, and Putin’s Russia all reflect continuations of centuries-old ambitions for regional or global preeminence that predate the current international system. China’s self-conception as the “Middle Kingdom” at the center of the world, with a mandate to rule “all under heaven,” intimates its revisionist ambitions on the world stage today.
India’s tradition is different. With the minor exceptions of the Chola and Kushan empires, India’s history of political expansionism is remarkably limited. Its founding political parable reflects an ethos of restraint: the story of Emperor Ashoka Maurya centers on his horror at the violence required to build his empire and his subsequent embrace of nonviolent spirituality. The contrast with China’s founding emperor, Qin Shi Huang, whose legacy celebrates the ruthlessness required to expand and consolidate power, could hardly be sharper. There are of course many counterexamples in the voluminous histories of each civilization, but it would be very difficult, in aggregate, to argue that India’s tradition of statecraft prizes imperial dominance to anywhere near the extent that China’s does.
More recently, India’s independence movement further reinforced the same instinct. Following centuries of British imperial rule, India’s founding leaders championed self-determination and national sovereignty. Historically a victim of foreign conquest more so than a conqueror itself, India values the international order of nation states and continues to pursue a strategy that is deeply suspicious of foreign coercion. Thankfully, the assertions made by Indian diplomats that their country is a “reformist” rather than a “revisionist” power has deep roots.
A Different System
One need not just rely on grand civilizational abstractions to recognize that India won’t exploit the international system as China has. The structural differences between the two states all but guarantee India will not follow in China’s wake.
China’s undermining of international trade and institutions was a deliberate strategy that could only be executed by a highly centralized Leninist party-state. After the international backlash following the Tiananmen Square massacre, Deng Xiaoping charged Communist Party leadership “to hide strength and bide time” until Beijing could challenge the Bretton Woods institutions underpinning the American-led order. Strict nationwide coordination made possible China’s exploitation of foreign businesses and markets. When a wave of democratization swept East Asia, China resisted liberalization through a carefully orchestrated, whole-of-government effort, deploying top-down state control of media, education, the private sector, and civil society to prevent reform from taking root.
India, by contrast, is a decentralized federal democracy. New Delhi cannot come close to replicating Beijing’s top-down exploitation of international trade and institutions. India’s judicial oversight and legal barriers against industry favoritism may be imperfect, but they still contrast sharply with the Chinese Communist Party’s absolute control over state-owned enterprises and the private sector. The strategic state subsidization Beijing employs for geopolitical leverage is simply beyond India’s reach.
The two nations also diverge in their commitment to international norms. While India occasionally pushes back on intellectual property protections in sectors like pharmaceuticals, it does not conduct the systemic, state-backed espionage campaigns or coercive joint ventures characteristic of the Chinese model. The authoritarian cynicism with which Beijing weaponizes everything from health supplies to agricultural goods remains foreign to the Indian political tradition. And where China has sought to reshape the United Nations to dilute standards of democracy and human rights, India typically uses its influence to hold the body accountable to its founding principles.
Overlearning China’s Lessons
The tragic irony of this moment is that in overlearning the lessons of China, Washington risks squandering the one relationship that could help it correct course. While China’s authoritarian system and tradition of statecraft gave it both the intent and structural capacity to subvert globalization, India’s history and institutions indicate no such threat. To the contrary, India’s rise is likely to reinforce regional and international stability, not least by constraining Chinese ambitions in the Indo-Pacific. A stronger India means a more contested neighborhood for Beijing, a more balanced Indo-Pacific, and a more credible check on Chinese coercion of smaller states across the region.
Admittedly, the era of unreflective Western investment that fueled China’s rise has passed, with the upshot that Western nations’ investment in India’s rise will have to look different. A rising tide of domestic populism, antipathy toward offshoring, and legitimate national security concerns have fundamentally altered the American and European political landscapes. These changes carry considerable implications for India. Corporations, too, are understandably wary of fostering “Huawei-like” competitors who might eventually challenge them through intellectual property theft or state-backed aggression.
Even so, supporting India’s rise remains an indispensable necessity for addressing the scale of the challenge posed by Beijing. Washington may seek to reshore critical manufacturing, but without deep collaboration with India it cannot hope to match China’s massive production capacity, which currently triples that of the United States. Likewise, it is difficult to imagine competing with China’s rapidly growing STEM workforce without India, given the growing margin with which China outproduces American STEM Ph.D.s – by the tens of thousands every year. Nor can the United States effectively peel back China’s growing influence in South Asia or elsewhere in the Global South without Indian collaboration.
In overlearning the lessons of China, Washington risks squandering the most important relationship it needs to counter China. Rubio’s trip to India should begin from that premise.
