India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has given the indication of ‘mindset change’ to his Chinese counterpart and renewed the efforts to build trust between India and china, two Asian economic giants. Indian PM, during his visit to china, defined India’s relationship with China as an ‘essay in comprehension’. He acknowledged Chinese premier Wen Jiabao’s understanding of the importance of bilateral relation between two countries and said that empires of the future are empires of the mind.
He said during his speech to Chinese think-tank ‘Chinese Academy of Social Sciences’ in Beijing that extremist thinking is a kind of threat to development anywhere and favored a need of collective battle against terrorism in the region and across the world as well. He also unveiled that the Sino-Indian relation would focus on mutual prosperity rather than animosity in future.
He said on the last day of his three-day visit that India and China should cooperate in creating a world of positive externalities and mutual prosperity, rather than balance of power equation and animosity.
Earlier, both the countries agreed to cooperate in different sectors including civil nuclear energy. The greater mutual understanding is necessary to create a global order that will have its impact on the economic strength but also on the rest of the world as well.
According to him, the world economy was mainly about western countries in 20th century but now it could be essentially about Asia in the 21st century. Till the mid-21st century, Asian countries would account for more than 50 per cent of trade, income, savings, investment and financial transactions of the world. There is a need to bridge the knowledge gap between India and China and to create much more sustained effort to ensure proper awareness of each country to other.
The more people-to-people contact would remove misconceptions and prejudices. He further said that both countries were in need to create a broad-based comprehensive dialogue at the level of intelligentsia, media, non-governmental professionals and the worlds of culture and the arts.
There are many more areas from where India can learn from China’s success such as creation of physical infrastructure, strategies to provide productive employment outside the agriculture sector, and poverty alleviation. There are some other areas for potential cooperation between both neighboring countries are science and technology, public health, education, institution building, water resource management and disaster management.
PM has given clear indication that the growing consumer market, skilled human resources, and software excellence in India should be clubbed with China’s own large market, its manufacturing prowess and cost competitiveness to provide the platform for exponential growth for both the countries.
