We are delighted to present a brand new series hosted by Sushant Singh (Senior Fellow, CPR), featuring leading experts on the multiple facets of Sino-India relations. In the first episode of the series, we are joined by Arunabh Ghosh (Historian and Associate Professor of Modern Chinese, History Department, Harvard University) to unpack Sino-India relations through a historical lens.

Together, Singh and Ghosh uncover the relationship between the two neighbours through documented exchanges in the 1950s involving statistics, mathematics and discussions on transnational institutions and scientific networks. They discuss the decline of these exchanges after the 1962 war, why the inadequate academic scholarship has not improved since and the dangers of intermediation of knowledge through a western prism. With China’s economic success creating a sense of envy in India, it is important to acknowledge the history of this success, the role of imperial legacies in the border crisis and the need to understand the nature of the Chinese state and what exactly happened between the two great nations.

Arunabh Ghosh website: https://scholar.harvard.edu/arunabh.ghosh

Books mentioned:

• Making it Count: Statistics and Statecraft in the early People’s Republic of China, Arunabh Ghosh (2020)
• Great State: China and the World, Timothy Brook (2019)
• From Rebel to Ruler: One Hundred Years of the Chinese Communist Party, Tony Saich (2021)
• The Cowshed: Memories of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, Ji Xianlin (2016)
• Eight Outcasts: Social and Political Marginalization in China Under Mao, Yang Kuisong (2019)
• How China Escaped Shock Therapy: The Market Reform Debate, Isabella Weber (2021)