I’ve been looking into the economic growth of China and India over the years, and it’s really eye-opening. Since 1960, both countries started from fairly similar economic positions, with low GDPs and large populations trying to recover and grow after colonialism, wars, and internal challenges.
The video above captures the insane visualisation of massive GDP gap that now exists between China and India. For a few decades, the gap between them was small. Both were growing slowly and dealing with poverty, infrastructure issues, and political hurdles. But then, around 1990, things started to change dramatically.
China began opening up its economy in the late 1970s, but the real explosion in growth came in the 1990s. Economic reforms, manufacturing growth, exports, and foreign investment pushed China into overdrive. In contrast, India also began liberalizing its economy in the early 1990s, but the pace and scale were much more gradual.
Watching the video I’ve attached, the difference becomes stark. Around 1990, China’s GDP starts to pull away fast. Year after year, it grows at a much faster pace than India’s, and by the 2000s, the gap is massive. It’s not just about raw numbers, China’s industrial growth, infrastructure investment, and global trade role completely reshaped its economy and lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty.
India has made progress too, especially in services, technology, and entrepreneurship, but the scale hasn’t matched China’s. The video makes it very clear how quickly the economic distance widened in just a few decades.
It’s a powerful visualisation of how policy choices, global conditions, and timing can dramatically affect the economic destiny of nations.
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