Exactly, India basically jumped straight to financial capitalism without even bothering to develop a serious industrial base. I don’t think it’s even a case of China refusing to give up its base, but just the fact that building out the kind of base China has requires a centrally planned system with a long term commitment to doing so. There’s no path towards doing that under capitalism. Vietnam will likely manage to industrialize eventually, but that doesn’t help the west in the long run because Vietnam is sensibly aligning with China now.
India is a good example of how economists believing that the labor theory of value isn’t true doesn’t actually make it false.
They can make government and economic decisions that ignore or at least sideline the growth and development of labour under the assumption that entrepeneurs and investors are the real motive force of society, but when tens of millions of people enter poverty every year in your country, education is underfunded, roads and railways for the workers to use are underfunded, and employment is underdeveloped, your growth will simply be stunted. You can scream from the rooftops that billionaires create value, not workers, in the hopes that some god will hear you, but it doesn’t change reality.
Every media organization can report, mostly hopefully and without real basis, that surely India will be the second largest economy in the world in 50 years (behind the good old US of A, of course! We will never be overshadowed!) and that surely China, with their unorthodox views of how to create a stable and good economy for the working class, will collapse any minute now, and us here can lean back and relax with the certainty granted by studies and Marxist theory that as long as the Chinese leadership doesn’t betray their communist values - and I don’t see why they would - China is and will remain the best performing economy on the planet for the foreseeable future. We don’t have to give a shit about the opinions of Jerome Powell and so on.
