As soon as news of the shrinking Chinese population broke, Bloomberg turned to India, following the financial coverage pattern of projecting eventual market impacts — and echoed by Indians like the Hindustan Times.
He highlighted an estimate by the American organization World Population Review, giving India with 1.417 billion inhabitants against 1.412 billion in China, more by growth itself than by reduction. “The UN expected the milestone towards the end of this year”, he noted, then getting down to business:
“As a market, India, with its growing middle class, is the biggest consumer of global sugar, being the biggest importer of edible oils. It is the second biggest consumer of steel and the third biggest buyer of oil.”
In a later text, echoed by Indian financiers such as Business Standard, the same Bloomberg highlighted the impact on the supply of labor, with a young population increasingly superior to that of China, but countering that unemployment has been increasing —and the participation of women it is minimal.
In India itself, voices appeared against the euphoria, by The Hindu and others, as in the case of a former president of its central bank, Raghuram Rajan. He warned in Davos that “it is premature to think that it will take China’s place in influencing global growth”.
His explanation was that today India is still “a much smaller economy” than China’s. “But that could change with time because India is already the fifth economy and it can keep growing.”
Outside of Bloomberg, in other western news outlets, attention to India’s population overshoot has been less. New Delhi, which was an American bet in its new cold war against Beijing, turned out to be resistant to alignment.
Despite the raids, Sino-Indian trade has just hit a new annual record. Perhaps more significantly, according to the same Bloomberg, India bought “33 times more Russian oil than a year earlier” in December, despite pressure from Washington.
The New York Times, close to the White House, comes from questioning Chancellor S. Jaishankar for defending India’s “multi-alignment”, as he calls it, prioritizing the country’s “self-interests” in the face of the “rapid elimination of the Western world order”.
This week, the British state-owned BBC went further and released a documentary against Prime Minister Narendra Modi himself, immediately questioned by the chancellery as “colonial propaganda”, via Hindustan Times and others.
Last week, both Modi and Jaishankar staged a virtual summit, which they called the Voice of the Global South, bringing together representatives of emerging countries against the “stagnation system” of global governance, including the UN, as highlighted by Jagran, the main newspaper in Hindi. (picture above).
In the statement of the Times of India, the main newspaper in English, “Modi: Global South must create a new world order”.
THE FUTURE OF HUMANITY
By newspapers such as Huanqiu (Global Times), from Beijing, a Chinese government spokesman was restrained when commenting on the projection that the rival and Asian ally would already be ahead:
“Both countries should make good use of the demographic dividend, to achieve their own development and make greater contributions to the future of mankind.”
I go on vacation, to return in the edition of February 27th.
With a wealth of experience honed over 4+ years in journalism, I bring a seasoned voice to the world of news. Currently, I work as a freelance writer and editor, always seeking new opportunities to tell compelling stories in the field of world news.
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