India Is Borrowing China's Playbook

A structural comparison of two economies, 2000–2025

India's top 1% now captures 22.6% of national income — a larger share than China's, a country widely criticized for inequality. India calls itself a democracy. China doesn't pretend otherwise.

That gap between label and reality is the most interesting thing a structural analysis covering 25 years of data has to offer. The finding isn't that India is becoming China. It's that India is borrowing China's tools without inheriting the social contract that made those tools work.

The binary broke down

The standard framing — democracy vs. authoritarianism, India vs. China — assumed the two systems would produce diverging outcomes over time. The 2025 data suggests something stranger: convergence in method, divergence in result.

The V-Dem Institute now classifies India as an "electoral autocracy." Elections still happen. But judicial independence, press freedom, and election commission autonomy have each been eroded in measurable ways. China remains a closed autocracy. The structural gap between the two is narrowing.

The surveillance architecture is the same. The branding is different.

India leads the world in internet shutdowns. Its Aadhaar biometric system and accelerating rollout of facial recognition mirror China's social governance infrastructure closely enough that the functional outcome — continuous state visibility over citizen behavior — is essentially identical.

Authoritarian instruments without authoritarian efficiency. The worst of both worlds.

The difference is rhetorical. China is explicit about control. India frames the same systems as "innovation" and "service delivery." Whether that framing holds up under global scrutiny, especially as AI regulation tightens internationally, is one of the more interesting open questions for anyone building in this space.

Industrial policy: the playbook is explicit

India's Production Linked Incentive schemes are openly modeled on China's Made in China 2025. Both identify national champions. Both direct capital toward strategic sectors. Both are bets on manufacturing dominance.

The mechanism differs. India uses fiscal incentives routed through private sector partners. China uses state-owned enterprises and direct subsidies. But the early results are real: India surpassed China as a leading smartphone exporter to the US in 2025. The playbook is working, at least in that narrow measure.

Where the models actually diverge: who gets the growth

This is the part that doesn't fit the standard narrative about democratic India vs. authoritarian China.

China, despite its political system, has delivered more equitable growth. Mass education investment, formalized labor markets, and targeted poverty reduction programmes produced a middle class that India, with all its democratic institutions, hasn't. India's growth is concentrated in what researchers are calling a Billionaire Raj.

What this means if you're building here

India's permissive regulatory stance on AI and biometric data is real, and in the short term it is genuinely useful. Minimal friction for data-intensive systems. No meaningful guardrails on facial recognition deployment. A builder's environment, in the narrow technical sense.

The longer-term risk is that this window closes faster than expected — either from domestic political pressure as inequality becomes harder to ignore, or from international regulatory pressure as India's global ambitions collide with emerging data governance norms. The time to build compliance infrastructure into products is before that pressure arrives, not after.

The other structural fact worth holding onto: 83.6% informal employment means the "billion-user market" narrative needs a serious socioeconomic filter. GDP growth and consumer market depth are not the same thing. China's Common Prosperity policy is explicitly designed to close that gap and expand domestic consumption. India hasn't made that bet yet.

China built its authoritarian efficiency on a foundation of mass education and poverty reduction. India is trying to install the control mechanisms without first laying that foundation.

The fragile bet

India is attempting something without clear precedent: a democratic framework layered over extreme inequality, accelerating executive centralization, and Chinese-style industrial policy. Whether that combination can deliver development outcomes — or whether it produces instability that neither model was designed to handle — is genuinely unknown.

The honest answer is that the old frameworks for thinking about India and China are no longer accurate. The binary broke. What replaced it is messier, harder to model, and more consequential than most of the analysis currently being written about either country.