Seeing China Through India’s Eyes in ‘Smoke and Mirrors

Posted by Buzzwatch Editor

By Maya Alexandri
For those who want to understand Asia’s emerging powerhouses, there are plenty of books about China and plenty about India, too. Both types usually seek to explain these nations to the West. But Pallavi Aiyar’s “Smoke and Mirrors: An Experience of China” is different: It looks at China’s transformation through the eyes of India.
Five years ago, Ms. Aiyar arrived in China as a teacher at the Beijing Broadcasting Institute. (Now Ms. Aiyar is the China correspondent for The Hindu, a Chennai (Madras)-based national newspaper.) She’d had no prior exposure to Chinese, but she learned the language and became the first Mandarin-speaking Indian journalist to report from Beijing. “Smoke and Mirrors” is part a memoir of her five years in China and part an analysis of the changing relationship between India and China, as the two countries assume greater roles in the balance of world power.
Having been published only in English in India, “Smoke and Mirrors” hasn’t yet caused a ripple in China. (For now, readers in the West who are interested canorder “Smoke and Mirrors” from a book exporter in India, such as Eastern Book Corp.)
But “Smoke and Mirrors” is getting noticed in India. Writing in Outlook India,Sanjaya Baru, the media advisor to the Indian prime minister, applauded “Smoke and Mirrors” for undermining the “neo-Orientalist” theory of “Chindia,” calling such a “spurious concept [the] . . . byproduct of lazy scholarship.” Meanwhile, The Times of India published an editorial, citing Ms. Aiyar’s experience with her wealthy landlord, who—despite his riches— unclogged Ms. Aiyar’s stopped toilet himself, and concluding: “China, a chimeric cross between authoritarian communism and rampant capitalism, passes the toilet test. India, a mongrel democracy scabbed by the scar tissue of caste, does not.”
“Smoke and Mirrors” offers perspectives rarely found in China books written by Westerners. While Americans may look with alarm at sweat shops in the Pearl River Delta, Aiyar writes approvingly about toilet cleaners (yes, another “toilet test”) in Beijing—men and women who live and work in the revamped public toilet facilities all over the capital. Ms. Aiyar observes that India’s sewage workers typically lack the latex gloves that their Chinese counterparts wear—a simple tool of the trade, but one that shows respect for the dignity of the person doing the work.
Forever being asked, “Which is better, China or India?” Ms. Aiyar tackles the question. Though she says her perspective sometimes changes from day-to-day, in the main, she believes that society’s poorest are better off in China. In Ms. Aiyar’s experience, with respect to the availability of work, food, shelter, commodities, community and health-care, China’s poorest may rank alongside India’s middle-class. On the other hand, she writes that she found China to be an un-intellectual land, a place where the heated dissent that characterizes a pleasurable debate in India has been drilled out of the population’s repertoire of social interactions. For those lucky enough to count the demands of their intellect above those of their stomach, Ms. Aiyar thinks India provides a more comfortable environment.
(China andIndia flag images from Wikipedia Commons)
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Making wild generalities about culture and differences, when in reality the differences are as simple as per capita GDP. In other words, when China had a lower per-capita GDP it looked more like India (just 15 years ago). Culture doesn’t change overnight. Bringing up caste is just plain stupid. Caste is just ethnicity in India. Class elitism in the UK is worse than India, yet they are a 1st world country.
In 20 years, when India is a low rich country (around $15000 per capita) people will be singing praises. It takes some maturity to see that people are actually very similar.
Comment by big_bear - June 4, 2008 at2:28 pm
I have just bought the book thanks to You.
Greetings from Italy
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