India's ambitions have gradually been exposed. Not only does India surpass China in population, it also wants to challenge China in all aspects.

Because India has always supported the United States, the direction of Apple's mobile phone production has also begun to shift from China to India. India's GDP in 2025 has now surpassed Japan. Some scholars even warned that India may become the "second China" in less than 10 years.

Will India really become the "second China"? Does China need to face up to India’s rise?

All contents stated in this article are reliable sources of information are detailed at the end of the article

"Second China"?

Recent statements about "India becomes the next China" are flying all over the sky. The International Monetary Fund also predicts that India's GDP will grow at an average annual growth rate of 6.5% in the next five years. You should know that the average forecast value of the global economy is only about 3%. Coupled with the population of more than 1.4 billion, this is comparable to China.

This also makes many people think that India takes over China seems to be a foregone conclusion, but is this almost replicable model really reliable? To be honest, the main driving force behind India's rise did not come entirely from New Delhi, but from the support of the United States.

In the past few decades, the world economy has formed a fairly stable closed loop. China's production, American consumption, and China have bought the money earned into US bonds and returned to the United States. This model once worked very well, but now the situation has changed. With China's own industrial upgrading, cracks have begun to appear in this closed loop.

The United States is eager to find a new "world factory", a country that can take over low-cost manufacturing, digest the risks brought by the US over-issuance of currencies, and ultimately serve the dollar hegemony system, so the United States has set its sights on India.

When the United States saw India's huge demographic dividend, it was shining. More than 65% of the population was under 35 years old, with a median population age of only 28 years old, while China's figure was 38 years old. This young "labor power reservoir" is expected to continue to grow until 2050.

This is not only a political choice, but also an instinctive behavior of capital to find the next explosion point of growth. Various Western experts have begun to advocate remarks such as "The next 10 years will be the 10 years of the rise of India's manufacturing industry". It is constantly amplified through the media and think tanks, which ultimately affects the flow of global investment, making this story sound more and more realistic.

The world of difference

It is wrong in itself to equate India today with China at the beginning of reform and opening up, because the industrial bases of the two countries are very different from human capital.

China's reform and opening up is more like an upgrade from 1 to 10. Before it opened its doors, it had established a set of industrial foundations with relatively backward technology but complete system, even including the military industry, which enabled it to quickly undertake industrial transfer and have the ability to quickly climb up the economy after digestion and absorption.

In contrast, India's situation is more like "from 0 to 1". Although India's service industry is extremely strong, especially in the fields of IT outsourcing and software development, Bangalore is also known as the "India Silicon Valley", with IT giants like Infosys born, and it is also a major global producer of generic drugs.

But these cannot conceal the relative weakness of India's industrial manufacturing capabilities. The performance problems of India's domestically produced "Glorious" fighter jets and rifles have been criticized by the outside world, which also reflects that India lacks a solid industrial base that can support the takeoff of large-scale and high-quality manufacturing.

In terms of population quality, India does have a huge "reservoir" of young labor, which is undoubtedly the "quality" of the population, not the "quantity".

After the founding of New China, national literacy and universal compulsory education were implemented, which laid a solid foundation for becoming a "world factory". The quality of India's education system is uneven. Although education is nominally free, due to the hidden influence of social classes, especially the caste system, it is difficult for the lower class to obtain high-quality educational resources, resulting in a large number of graduates' skills that do not match the needs of modern industries.

Even if there is continuous injection of external capital and a huge population base, the deep-rooted social structure and governance models within India are always obstructing India's economic development. The most intuitive thing is the gap in governance efficiency. China's work efficiency is extremely high. Just look at the high-speed railway network that exceeds 40,000 kilometers.

Although India's democracy brings social vitality, it often leads to slow decision-making processes, and there are often differences between the central and local governments. This efficiency difference is directly reflected in India's backward infrastructure, poor road conditions, old railways, congested ports, and unstable power supply have all become hard bottlenecks in economic development.

In the second quarter of 2024, India's GDP growth rate fell to 5.4%, the lowest level in the past seven quarters, and this may also be due to the drag of these infrastructures.

The more critical reason is social injustice. Although India's caste system has long been abolished legally, its ideas still have an impact in various fields such as employment and education, solidifying the social class and greatly hindering the release of social mobility and overall productivity.

Layer obstacles

This also explains why although India's poverty reduction achievements have been significant, with the poverty rate dropping from about 22.5% in 2011 to about 10% in 2023, progress among the federal states is extremely uneven, and the problems of poverty and malnutrition in rural areas are still serious, which is still a huge gap compared with China's achievements in reducing the extreme poverty rate to below 1% and lifting more than 800 million people out of poverty.

The last thing we have to mention is the business environment. According to the World Bank ranking, China's business convenience ranks 31st, while India is 63rd. This also reflects the real problems of bureaucracy and corruption in India. Some unfavorable incidents targeting foreign companies, such as Xiaomi and Coca-Cola, in the past, have made investors in other countries feel scared.

This unstable policy environment greatly weakens India's ability to attract and retain capital. So India will not be the "second China", it will only be the "first India", it is rising into an important global force. This is an objective fact, but it will embark on a path that is completely different from China and full of its own characteristics.

No one is a substitute for anyone. Every country is a unique existence. We can see that India has global competitiveness in the fields of IT and medicine. It has also set an ambitious goal of achieving 450 GW of renewable energy installed capacity by 2030. At the same time, on the international stage, there is no only competition between China and India.

The two countries are both members of the BRICS countries and the SCO. The bilateral trade volume in 2023 exceeded US$100 billion. Despite border disputes and India's international sidelines, India still has huge potential for cooperation in new energy and other fields. So it does not exist if India wants to become China, but we must also be vigilant at all times!

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