media - China, a place where things work

Andrew Lih points me at this report by China BBC-correspondent Rupert Wingfield-Hayes who got the opportunity to compare China with India. He did not like India:

The hotel was expensive and bad. In my room I searched for a high speed internet connection, a standard feature in any hotel in China. There was not one.
Then with the night-time temperature still well above 30C (86F) the power went out.

It is especially funny if you know China from the days where literally nothing worked.

Later that day as I drove home from Beijing airport along the smooth six-lane highway I could not help feeling a sense of relief at being back in a country where things work.
And it was not just the airports and roads.

I know it is highly fashionable to compare China and India, but does it makes that much sense. What they have in common is their size of land, population and the fact that they are not the USA. In the past the idea was very often that because the two countries had opposite political systems, you could implicite compare both systems. That worked out pretty well as long as the democratic system in India performed better than the non-democratic system in China. Now their economic roles have reversed, that is not going to make democracy anything worse or better than is was, is it?