India and China: A Historical Overview

The purpose of this chapter is to provide a general overview of how India and China have evolved over many centuries. This is essential for understanding the factors that have contributed to the development of strategic thinking in these countries. The strategic thinking constitutes an essential background to understanding the way that actors in these cultures approach the process of negotiations. China and India have considerably different historical legacies. These differences notwithstanding, we are dealing with ancient civilizations that have had their ups and downs during the ages. The East India Company played an important role in India, in sharp contrast to China. In China no company had so much influence and ultimately China was never colonized except for settlements in coastal cities. This is a crucial difference in the historical evolution of these societies and one that has had an important impact in terms of how they each relate to the external world. The other significant difference and one of more recent origin, is the Chinese experience of Communism. India, although attracted to the socialist model, never underwent a revolution of the type that China went through. Mao Zedong’s legacy was in many ways repudiated by Deng Xiaoping, and this led China to reverse radically its path of economic transformation.