The Factory, the Office and the West: Reading the Sino-Indian Rivalry Back to Economic Reality
No. 60, Jul.-Aug. 2026 This essay looks again at the Chinese and Indian “economic miracles”, not as events that cannot be explained, but as the results of institutional reform. It then asks where the rivalry between the two Asian giants is being fought today. The main argument is that the United States and the European Union are not the main actors in this story, but external arenas in which the competition between China and India is expressed and measured. By looking at the American side (tariffs and “de-risking”) and the European side (regulation, connectivity and trade agreements), the essay shows how China and India turn Western policy into strategic decisions aimed, in the end, at each other. The conclusion is that globalisation today has not removed the rivalry between states, but only moved it to a new place and that the result will depend on the quality of institutions rather than on the idea of a “miracle”. More
