China, India, and the Two Faces of Education

According to Australia’s Strategic Policy Institute, China now leads in 57 out of 64 of the world’s most critical technologies. Let’s say you take that with a bagful of salt. Even then, it’s a staggering achievement for a country that, in 1950, was desperately poor, agrarian, and largely cut off from the modern world.

A big part of the story lies in how China treated education: not as a private ladder for individual mobility, but as public infrastructure for national progress. Universal literacy, mass schooling, and later technical and vocational pathways were pursued with relentless focus, tied directly to industrial and technological goals.

India, meanwhile, never finished the basic education project. We jumped straight to elite higher education — the IITs and IIMs — creating world-class islands of excellence, but leaving the vast majority adrift. China built broad foundations; India built narrow peaks.

The outcomes show. China has a workforce where literacy and numeracy are almost universal. It has pathways into skilled technical work for millions. In India, large sections of children still struggle to read fluently by age ten. Vocational education remains stigmatized, a fallback for those who “couldn’t make it” into the academic track. Our brightest go abroad; our weakest are written off.

Take the WorldSkills competitions — the global Olympics of vocational skills like welding and bricklaying. In Lyon 2024, China swept the field: 36 gold, 9 silver, and 4 bronze medals, plus 8 Medallions of Excellence. India, by contrast, won just 4 bronze medals and 12 medallions — no gold, no silver. These numbers aren’t trivia. They are the clearest signal of how differently the two countries have invested in, and dignified, vocational learning.

It isn’t that China’s education system is ideal — it is rigid, exam-driven, and politically constrained. But it was aligned to a national project: lifting hundreds of millions out of poverty, building factories, advancing research, shaping a skilled workforce. In India, education became more of a family project: something parents chase to secure upward mobility for their children. The state never treated it as non-negotiable infrastructure on par with roads or electricity.

The results are visible not just in statistics, but in culture. In China, the factory worker or technician is part of a collective effort; in India, dignity of work is still tied to caste and hierarchy. We valorise the engineer at Google but disregard the skilled welder who builds the bridge we drive on.

So what can India still learn? First, finish the basics: universal foundational literacy and numeracy, delivered well. Second, rebuild respect for technical and vocational education, not as a second-rate option but as a mainstream pathway. Third, stop fetishizing elite institutions as the answer to every problem. It is broad competence, not narrow brilliance, that lifts nations.

China’s rise was not inevitable. It was constructed through choices — many of them hard, often coercive, sometimes brutal, but unmistakably systemic. India’s path was also a choice: to celebrate excellence without fixing the ground beneath. Seventy-five years on, the gap between the two choices is visible in every global ranking, every manufacturing statistic, and yes, every technology league table.

We don’t have to become China. But we do have to confront the uncomfortable truth: real learning is not a privilege for the few; it is infrastructure for the many. Until India embraces that, we will keep mistaking the occasional peak for a mountain range.