India and China: A yearning for the soul of two nations

“Our economy may increasingly be dynamic,” Sonia Gandhi, the president of the Congress party, said last week in New Delhi, “but our moral universe seems to be shrinking.”

Her words quickly swirled into the tempest of India’s ongoing corruption scandal. A recent government audit found that roughly $40 billion had been frittered away by selling telecommunications licenses to well-connected companies at far below market values. That is enough money, had it properly been collected, to feed the hungriest tenth of Indians for one full year.

But Sonia Gandhi seemed to be speaking of more than just the scandal. Her diagnosis was severe and far-reaching, sharpened perhaps by her special insider-outsider lens as an Italian-born, Indian-widowed, Uttar Pradesh-elected national leader.

“Prosperity has increased, but so has social conflict,” she said. “Intolerance of various kinds is growing. Graft and greed are on the rise. The principles on which independent India was founded, for which a whole generation of great leaders fought and sacrificed their all, are in danger of being negated.”

Sonia is hardly the only Indian to feel this way. One hears this anguish more and more in the salons of Delhi and Mumbai and in the Indian media. In China, too, on a visit last summer, I heard over and over from young people fortunate enough to be thriving that their nation was unmoored, lost, morally confused, suffering a crisis of meaning often hard to perceive in the shadows of frothing growth.

“It is impossible to feel calm and quiet in a society that only chases profits,” Ji Qi told me in the smoky lobby of a Marriott Hotel in Shanghai.

He is a serial entrepreneur, the founder of two hotel companies and of the online travel portal Ctrip.com. He is part of what has made China grow so quickly; but he said he had come to regret some of the byproducts of that speed.

In this view, there is too much mimicry of western models, regardless of their fit. There is too much attention to money, and not enough on culture and values. Journalists, Ji said, don’t ask him what he thinks or how China might be changed; they concentrate on his Forbes rich-list ranking.

“A good civilisation should be balanced between material and spiritual,” he said. He thinks that China will undergo, like South Korea before it, a rapid religious revival in the coming decades as more and more people come to feel what he feels. Lately he finds himself turning to ancient Taoist texts, to Confucius, to Buddhism, all to anchor himself. He said what so many others did, in different ways: “We need an evolution of thoughts and ideas.”

The world has been aflutter with talk of India and China for several years now. So much of that talk — like so much of the chatter within those countries — is about doing: what their software industries will do to the west, what their coal industries will do to the ecosystem, what their navies will do on the high seas, what their manufacturing sectors will do to the global trade in shoes, medicine, cars.

But if the sentiments of young thrivers in these countries is any guide, the next chapter in the Indian and Chinese stories will not be about doing. It will be, rather, about being.

The frenetic doing will go on. India and China each have hundreds of millions of citizens waiting to escape hard, impoverished lives. Many still lining up to thrive would be surprised to hear that change is coming too quickly.

But, among those who have arrived, we may see a rising tendency toward self-scrutiny. It could take disparate forms: Indians and Chinese turning down lucrative jobs to join think tanks, become journalists, activists or otherwise play their part in the public sphere; young people digging into these two ancient cultures to find ideas of what to wear, read and eat, after the feverish years of westernisation; sobering media that interrogate growth instead of just giving evidence of it; philosophers guiding these nations toward new constellations of values.

It is easy to forget, especially when in the west, but also when towering above the land in the sparkling new apartment complexes of Beijing and Mumbai, just how much India and China are going through right now — not economically, not militarily, but deep in their souls.

A relentless futurism has gripped two societies that long prided themselves on reverence for the past. A migration from the countryside to the city is changing their essential characters, with restless, rootless urbanites replacing villagers as the cultural centre of gravity.

Social upheavals that took decades, even centuries, in the west — from feminism to gay rights to the rise of respect for the young — are happening in a historical flash. Parents are finding themselves unforeseeably abandoned in their final earthbound years. Founding heroes whose faces adorn currency — in China, Mao; in India, Gandhi — no longer inspire the same fervour, but new heroes are nowhere to be found.

Indians and Chinese now have time to reflect about growth — as evidenced perhaps in the thousands who turned out last weekend to mourn those who perished in an apartment tower inferno in Shanghai. The questions they are asking are not only about superpowerdom and their place in the world. They are also about anchoring and purpose, about the quiet life within.