Chinese developments in recent decades resulted in part from the ability to control an explosive birth rate, but now even the end of the one-child policy does not convince couples to have larger families. India, with more young people, is in a position to show greater economic dynamism.
The fact that India overtakes China as the world’s most populous country does not, in itself, change the balance of power vis-à-vis China or their respective positions in the rankings of world power and development. But it is relevant, and India will certainly take advantage of it either as a supplementary argument in its candidacy for permanent membership of the UN Security Council, or to claim to be not only “the largest democracy in the world” but also responsible for the fact that the most populous country now be a democracy! And that’s in addition to the enormous potential conferred by a young population”, says Luís Tomé, professor of International Relations at the Autonomous University of Lisbon and a great connoisseur of the dynamics of the two Asian giants. According to United Nations forecasts, China will no longer be the country with the most people this year, a position that will be occupied by India. At the end of 2022 both countries had 1430 million inhabitants (data from the Economist Intelligent Unit, but with a certain margin of error).
Since the middle of the 20th century, there has been a symbolic competition between India and China, namely on the relative merits of the forms of governance chosen by one and the other. Since its independence in 1947, putting an end to British colonization, India has been faithful to the democratic matrix desired by Jawaharlal Nehru and Mahatma Gandhi, while China, proclaimed People’s Republic in 1949 by Mao Zedong, continues to be governed by the Communist Party. After the economic reforms adopted in the late 1970s by Deng Xiaoping, the pace of Chinese development exploded and today the GDP is about six times higher than that of India, which is reflected well in the relative wealth of the inhabitants of each one. But since 2021 India’s economic growth rate has been higher than that of China, and forecasts for the following years (in 2023 it is 5.1% against 4.7%) confirm this trend, which leads Indian leaders to trust that they have a larger population, and above all a much younger one, will end up reducing the gap with the neighbor.
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