by alephnerd | 2025-12-15 02:05:28+00:00
> First, thanks for contributing your expertise

No worries. This is my kvetching/random posting throwaway.

> Couldn't we say the US has a similar relationship with India now, at least before Trump II

Not to the same degree simply because

1. India's economy today has reached the same inflection point that the Chinese economy did in the late 2000s and early 2010s.

2. Middle Powers like Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, France, and Israel have either caught up to or exceed American capacity in a number of critical technologies, and have begun mass scale capital and tech transfers to India

For 1,

India is essentially following the same trajectory as China, but 10-15 years behind because the economic isolation India faced from 1976-1991 along with the Warsaw Bloc's weakening economic heft lead to the 1990s era political and economic crisis.

India wasn't the only Soviet-leaning country that faced this issue. Even Vietnam - which used to have a HDI and GDP PPP per Capita well above the PRC until the late 1990s - suffered a lost decade for the same reasons India did due to the collapse of the Eastern Bloc.

For 2,

A major reason China took off in the 2000s was because Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese partners like TDK, Toshiba, Samsung, UMC, Nissan, Honda, Hyundai, etc all began transferring IP related to energy, biotech, military hardware, semiconductors, automobiles, and other STEM industries to China via JVs. For example, BYD and CATL got their head starts in the 2000d thanks to Samsung and TDK respectively transferring battery chemistry IP to them in the 2000s.

Japanese, Taiwanese, South Korea, French, and Israeli firms all started similarly mass IP and capital transfers to Indian JVs from 2014 due to a mix of economic and geopolitical tensions with China along with the fact that India has become the last large greenfield economy that Chinese competitors cannot operate within.

-------

Because of 1 and 2, India has started exhibiting similar hallmarks to China back when I was observing them closely (and being ignored) in the late 2000s and early 2010s. In the Indian policymaking space, policies similar in scale and ambition to those that the PRC adopted in the early 2010s are being constantly enacted, and just like "China Shock" 15 years ago, an "India Shock" has started arising at least in IP heavy industries.

The fact that India is now spending around $205B on infra [0] (comparable to Chinese infra spend in the early 2010s), a combined [1] $30B [2] on semiconductor development (comparable in size to the Chinese Big Fund 1.0), $12B in government provided DeepTech VC funding [3] that is being matched dollar-for-dollar by private giants like Nvidia and Qualcomm [4], and similarly sized initiatives by the Japanese [5], Korean [6], Taiwanese [7], French [8], and Israeli [9] champions, and subsidizing electronic components [10] and rare earth [11] processing upskilling, enacting China-style labor reforms [12], and opening the entire Nuclear [13] and Electricity [14] sector to 100% private investment means a lot of capacity is in the process of being built out at the same scale as was in China during the early years of the Xi admin's "Make in China" initiative.

This is why I keep harping about India - even if a large portion of the funds are misallocated, they would still end up developing an ecosystem. The same thing happened with mismanagement of funds in the first iteration of "Make in China" but administrative capacity got better.

If we mismanage the India relationship, we may inadvertently end up making another ambivalent continental scale rival like China and Russia (yes they are in a recession and nowhere near as powerful as they were at their peak, yet they can enact severe pain nonetheless).

[0] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2025-06-12/india-...

[1] - https://carnegieendowment.org/research/2025/08/indias-semico...

[2] - https://manufacturing.economictimes.indiatimes.com/amp/news/...

[3] - https://www.ibef.org/news/government-approves-rs-1-00-000-cr...

[4] - https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/nvidia...

[5] - https://asia.nikkei.com/politics/international-relations/jap...

[6] - https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20250903PD208/samsung-india-...

[7] - https://focustaiwan.tw/business/202506240030

[8] - https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/indias-defence-industry-is...

[9] - https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2025-04-19/ty-article-ma...

[10] - https://www.reuters.com/world/india/india-approves-626-milli...

[11] - https://www.reuters.com/world/india/india-approves-816-mln-r...

[12] - https://www.ft.com/content/b991095c-e0b9-425e-949d-ecc5d3039...

[13] - https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat...

[14] - https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/india-...