Learning from China

Indian Union Minister of State for Personnel, Public Grievances and Pensions V. Narayanasamy recently met his Chinese counterpart Yin Weimin in Beijing.
According to Ananth Krishnan of The Hindu "Mandarins and Babus to learn from each other".
One can only hope that the babus and the mandarins will exchange good practices. 
Last month, I mentioned on this blog an article of the China Economic Weekly which says that scores of Party's officials were fleeing China with large amounts of money.
The China’s Academy of Social Science released statistics showing that between 16,000 to 18,000 Party officials had fled the country since the mid 1990s, taking away with them 800 billion yuan with them. 
A Report of the People’s Bank of China suggested that dishonest officials had clandestinely taken $124 billion of illegally obtained money out of the country between 1995 and 2008. 
The mandarin's practices were detailed in my posting The Chinese babus invest abroad.
Since then, Radio Free Asia affirmed that "Half of World’s 'Black Dollars' Are from China; Capital Flight Is Accelerating":

The German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung said that in the past 10 years, through different means and various channels, the illegal funds fleeing from China reached a staggering US $3 trillion. Out of every two 'black dollars' in the world, one is from China. It was estimated that, after the 18th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, when the authorities considered implementing the exposure of the personal assets of government officials, the capital flight accelerated to US$ 41.2 billion in November alone. Süddeutsche Zeitung reported that the second largest group responsible for the flight of capital was government officials.
Li Xinde, who runs a website that monitors Chinese public opinion, believed that the cause of the problem was the current policies and laws that involve anti-corruption, exposure of personal assets, and supervision of power.
A Beijing economist Zhong Dajun attributed the rampant capital flight to the current social political system, where a person can become rich quickly but develop a strong sense of insecurity after becoming rich. A 2011 report from China’s central bank revealed eight major means that corrupt officials use to transfer their property: cash smuggling, remittance fraud, current account fraud, overseas investment, credit card spending, creating an offshore financial center, foreign direct receipt, and transfer through offshore special relationships.

Indians still have a lot of things to learn from China.  
But one can't put the entire blame on the bureaucrats, business people are also leaving China. 
On January 6, Xinhua mentioned China’s International Migration Report (2012), released in December which indicated that among business owners with personal assets of more than one billion yuan (US $ 160 million), 27 percent have emigrated, and 47 percent are considering emigration.
In the past three years, at least 17 billion yuan ($US2.7 billion) of capital has flown abroad. According to the Blue Book many businessmen transfer their 'gray income' overseas to avoid tax and evade prosecution.

Mandarins and ‘Babus’ to learn from each other
Ananth Krishnan
The Hindu
January 17, 2013 
Indian and Chinese officials plan to train together and exchange best practices on reforms
Two of the world’s biggest bureaucracies — India and China — have begun an effort to share their experiences of carrying out administrative reforms and to jointly train their civil servants, following talks between the two governments here this week. In an effort to share “best practices” — more sensitive issues such as the rampant corruption plaguing both governments have been kept off the table, for now — both countries have decided to come together to learn about each other’s experiences in carrying out administrative reforms within two of the world’s most complicated and vast bureaucratic systems.
Union Minister of State for Personnel, Public Grievances and Pensions V. Narayanasamy and Chinese Minister for Human Resources Yin Weimin held day-long talks on Tuesday that covered a range of issues from assessing the performance of officials to social security and the functioning of the public sector in both countries.
China has offered to host Indian civil servants at the Chinese Academy of Personnel Sciences for training, while India will similarly choose an institution to host young Chinese bureaucrats. A delegation from India will visit China in May to kick-start the process, while officials from Beijing will travel to India in November. China’s vast bureaucracy — a source of increasing criticism from some quarters here on account of its opacity — is more than three times the size of India’s, employing 3.7 crore officials in the Centre and provinces. While talks on expanding cooperation are at an early stage, Mr. Narayanasamy said he was particularly struck by the Chinese approach to training civil servants. Here, officers are only trained intensively for five months before taking up their jobs,compared to a two-year period in India.

Learning Chinese

Ten thousand Chinese teachers for India: that's good news. In the years to come, it will be more and more important to know Chinese, whether the rise of China is peaceful or not. 
The initiative taken by Minister of Human Resource Development Kapil Sibal and his Taiwanese counterpart is therefore excellent.
A few months back, I had said the most positive aspect of Premier Wen Jiabao's visit to India (in December 2010) was the opening of a school to learn Chinese in Delhi.
It reminds me of the story of a senior Indian Officer who was taken prisoner of war in Tibet/China after the October 1962 debacle. 
One thing that he noted was the proficiency of the Chinese in Indian languages: 

It was a real surprise for us when one day a Chinese woman came and recited some of Bahadur Shah Zafar's poems, much to the delight of us all, but particularly so of Rattan [another Indian officer prisoner of war]. This lady and Rattan did have an exchange of couplets of Zafar's poems written while he was pining away in Rangoon for his homeland after deportation by the British from his last Mohgul kingdom in Delhi following the so-called mutiny of 1857. The Chinese had certainly prepared for this war most diligently because they had interpreters for every Indian language right in the front line. This Urdu-speaking woman must have lived in Lucknow for a long time.

The same officer recounts another story worth reproducing: 

There was a beautiful demonstration of the high calibre of the Indian soldier under adverse conditions. After we had been in the camp for about a month, we were taken out of our confinement for a walk. This was at our insistence on wanting to exercise ourselves and to get out of the dark and dingy rooms. We were thrilled to be out in the sun. Inspite of protests from Lt Tong [Chinese guard] not to do so, we sat down against a wall to sun ourselves. As luck would have it, though we could not see over the wall, we heard voices in Hindi from the other side. Fortunately, Lt Tong did not understand Hindi otherwise he would have forced us to get up and move away. What we heard from the other side made us feel very proud to belong to the Indian Army. It was a Hindi-speaking Chinese talking to some jawans, obviously from 9 Punjab judging from their manner of speaking. The talk was going in the usual way about how India had attacked first. A jawan told the Chinese that his company was sleeping when the Chinese attack came, so how could India have started the war? The Chinese tried to explain that he (the Indian soldier) was only thinking of his sub-unit but India had attacked elsewhere and the Chinese had to take action in self defence in his sector. The Indian jawan was obviously fearless and outspoken and said, "I do not know what you are talking about but the whole of my battalion and the `burgerade', (as a Punjabi soldier would pronounce the word 'brigade') were sleeping when you attacked first".The Chinese tried to talk of other sectors but this jawan was not taken in. So, the Chinese then said, "your reactionary government of Nehru has made friends with America. Every day big American planes are landing in Tezpur bringing weapons including automatic rifles. So obviously your Nehru does not want to be friends with China. These Americans are nothing but 'paper tigers'." The Chinese use of the term `paper tiger' for the Americans was frequent (from Maj. Gen. K.K. Tewari, A Soldier's Voyage to Self Discovery, 2002). 

The Indian soldiers may have not been well prepared for the conflict, but they did not lack courage. 
It reminds that India has to ask Taiwan and not China for Chinese teachers. This shows a deficit of trust vis-a-vis the PRC. It is true that the percentage of spies should be less if the teachers come from Taipei than Beijing.

MOE answers India's call for Mandarin instructors
Taiwan Today
05/10/2011
The Ministry of Education said May 9 that it will offer short-term training courses in Chinese-language instruction to certified teachers looking for employment to prepare them for teaching positions in India.
Education Minister Wu Ching-ji visited India last week to attend a higher education fair, during which Indian Minister of Human Resource Development Kapil Sibal asked that Taiwan send 10,000 Mandarin instructors to teach at high schools in the South Asian nation.
“In response to India’s request, the MOE has formed a special task force to train teachers and compile teaching materials,” said Lin Wen-tong, director of the ministry’s Bureau of International Cultural and Educational Relations.
Indian high schools recently began offering second-language courses, with a majority of students opting for Mandarin. The schools, however, face a serious shortage of instructors.
As for which teachers will be selected for the positions in India, Lin said those who have passed qualification exams to teach Mandarin will be given priority.
Due to insufficient qualified Mandarin teachers, three-month training courses will be offered for regular teachers who are willing to teach in India, he pointed out.