Allow me to suggest a new reason why India may be more likely to experience sound long-term economic growth, while China may falter: the very different role of women in each society.
My first glimpse of the fact that women may enjoy a different status in India than in China was visiting ICICI and noticing the number of women executives in its senior management ranks.
At software companies in Bangalore, I was impressed to see confident women engineers leading presentations as 'project owners.'
The results of the elections last December, which brought the number of women chief ministers to five, further confirmed my impression.
These anecdotes may be overstating the case, but remember that the argument I shall be trying to make is relative, not absolute.
Think of it this way: there is no Lijjat Papad in China. Our task in this article is to understand why and what are the possible implications?
In China, you can count the number of prominent women -- be it in business, politics, or the civic sector -- on one hand. There is Wu Yi, the vice-premier who successfully led the fight against SARS, by all accounts a formidable figure.
There is Wang Jiafen, the head of Bright Dairy, a Shanghai company in which Danone, the French multinational, holds a stake.
There is Dai Qing, a social crusader in the mould of Arundhati Roy. Dai has led the battle against the Three Gorges Dam, unsuccessfully, and she champions a variety of reformist causes. Unless I am forgetting someone, this is about it.
Outside of this trio, there is little evidence of women's participation in political, economic, or social life. On the fringes of society, in China's remote rural areas, women are said to be active in folk shamanistic practices.
This is partly because the authorities are less likely to crack down on women involved in unofficial organisations and partly because women, especially older women with grown children, have less to lose than men.
But within mainstream society, women are more notable for their absence.
Indeed, China is unique in terms of the suicide rate for women. China has one of the world's highest suicide rates to begin with. Within this propensity for suicide, Chinese women kill themselves far more frequently than men, so much so that 56 per cent of all female suicides worldwide occur in China.
This is in stark contrast to other countries, where more men than women kill themselves. It is perhaps that women, as one author, Jean Baechler, has written, endure misfortune better than men.
Studies of the Nazi concentration camps show that women survived better than men, both in terms of numbers and psychological well being.
In China, however, women seem more keen to escape. More women die in China of suicide than of diabetes, heart disease, or cancer.
This preference can only bespeak of lower status, as suicide has been described as the weapon of the weak. Mao once proclaimed that "women hold up half the sky," but his characteristic optimism appears at odds with reality.
The roots of gender preferences in contemporary China may be traced back to Confucianism, which regarded women as inferior. As an ideology for political governance as well as personal behaviour, Confucianism was not prone to compromise or softness.
Confucianism was masculine par excellence. This is strange because the philosophy emerged at a time when China was a primitive, agricultural collection of states.
Agricultural societies often emphasise feminine principles, such as the fecundity of nature, its capacity to offer shelter and security, its unpredictability.
To be sure, there are some hints of femininity within Confucianism. Confucians conceived of the self in a social sense, as a node in a network of relationships.
Confucian understanding relied more on intuition, a feminine characteristic, than on belief in formal processes.
Daoism, the other major strand in Chinese civilisation, was overtly feminine, but its influence over Chinese civilisation pales in comparison to Confucianism.
As these earlier systems of thought receded into the background, the predominant ideology in China today appears to be an acceptance of modern western values, masculine for the most part, including a macho nationalism (although China itself is often referred to in the feminine).
As an immigrant, albeit still Chinese, society, Taiwan is different from the mainland in terms of the women's position, as in other respects. After all, the vice-president is a woman, Annette Lu.
The legislature has many vocal women members, many of whom were elected and not inducted by quota.
Women dominate associations such as Compassionate Relief, a religious charitable group, and the Homemakers Union, an environmental foundation.
Eighty per cent of Compassionate Relief's 4 million members (out of a national population of some 22 million) are women. But in business, as across the Taiwan Strait, women are rare.
Two of the island's most prominent businesswomen work for foreign companies: Rosemary Ho at Hewlett-Packard (formerly Compaq) and Eunice Chiu at Microsoft, where they head the Taiwan operations.
The most prominent woman at a domestic company is Nita Ing, head of a construction group, but she is a second-generation industrialist.
Do women make a critical difference to economic progress and, if so, why? Progress (i.e, the development of societies) can be said to be a process of feminisation.
Men's innate, forceful masculinity, exemplified by values such as courage and heroism, is tempered over time as more complex and discrete qualities are taken on board: cooperation, compassion, understanding.
China's chief corporate challenge in the years ahead, to give one example, is surely management: how to structure large, complex organisations.
China's current manufacturing focus doesn't pose great difficulties in this respect. But think of Infosys, with some 20,000 employees, and the architectural challenge building such an organisation poses.
In addressing this challenge, feminine values are more useful than masculine ones. More broadly, feminine qualities better prepare societies for the challenges of modernity.
Manufacturing in China today typically involves people (mostly young women, as it happens) working on assembly lines.
The workers interact with objects, not with other people or each other. Software services, India's star industry, is very different.
While programming can be an individualistic endeavour, services by definition involve communicating and interacting with others.
If masculine qualities are required to organise efficient production, feminine qualities such as understanding are critical in services. And industrial manufacturing is not the future; services are.
In capturing this future today, India has tapped its internal resources. Yes, gender discrimination exists in India today, as it does in China, and the reason may be another ideology: Brahmanic tradition -- the equivalent, in many ways, of Confucianism.
But earlier Aryan culture, and many modern developments, have provided an alternate foundation. For Gandhi, the fight for independence was paralleled by a fight against sexual oppression.
Both forms of dominance needed to be undone.
Gandhi's nurturing, non-violent, feminine approach can be contrasted with the violent interventionism of the Chinese state.
As Ashis Nandy has written: "The ultimate authority in the Indian mind has always been feminine." India, I would like to argue, represents an embrace of pluralistic and feminine values in the same way that, by and large, China represents an absence of these values.
Not all values are created equal, and not all are required to equal degrees as we and our societies progress. With respect to feminine values, and a fuller participation by women in society, China can learn from India.
An expert on Greater China, Matei Mihalca was recently selected by the World Economic Forum as a New Asian Leader. He is director at CITIC Capital, a unit of China's largest financial group.
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