Why does the world want to compare China with India? What's the sentiment lying below?

Question

When newspapers or magazines talk about CHina these days, the articles always try to compare the country with India. Why?

Answer 1

Similar populations and economic booms. The most interesting difference is their forms of governments. Perhaps the underlying message is the pros or cons of communism(which China is, sort of).

Answer 2

Both are developing economies and have large populations (both over 1 billion people) with an educated work force.

The comparison is generally over business - in particular who can grab the most business from Western countries. India gets a lot of the outsourcing business because Indians can speak English. So a lot of companies have retrenched their US staff and sent their call centres to India.

China on the other hand has a very strong manufacturing base. Labour is cheap and in terms of technology is strong. Both countries compete with each other for a share of the global economic pie. China's weakness is its lack of English, and India's manufacturing is weaker than China's. No doubt in the coming decades there will be even more intensive competition between the two, as their populations are so large and they have their challenges to improve their own economies, provide jobs and increase their standards of living.