The NYT reports that some Chinese intellectuals and officials have kind words for India:
“India is a far more diverse country… a place with the second largest Muslim population in the world, and lots of ethnic minorities, and yet it organizes regular elections without conflict. China is 90 percent Han, so if India can conduct elections, so can China.” [Pang Yongzhing, a professor of international relations at Nankai University in Tianjin]
India, a paragon of manufacturing efficiency?
“To produce goods worth $10,000, for example, we need seven times more resources than Japan, nearly six times more than the United States and, perhaps most embarrassing, nearly three times more than India.” [Pan Yue, China’s environment minister]
Respect for intellectual property? He’s probably never visited a pirate desi Blockbuster store.
“In India there is a lot more room to move around… their capital markets are good, their banking sector is better than in China, and there is entrepreneurialism everywhere in India, along with well-protected intellectual property rights. All of these are things that China lacks.” [Zhang Jun, director of the China Center for Economic Studies at Fudan University in Shanghai]
Some desis have a disturbing attachment to authoritarian government, or perhaps (not so disturbing at all) just plain effectiveness:
There is constant talk these days of turning Mumbai, the southern commercial metropolis formerly known as Bombay, into a new Shanghai, China’s most glitteringly modern city… Such contrasts have left some Indians to remark, sometimes despairingly, about a “democracy price” that slows development… “I’m often approached by friends returning impressed from China, saying how our airports in Bombay and Delhi can’t compare,” said G. P. Deshpande, a longtime China scholar at Jawaharal Nehru University in Delhi. “When I tell them that these things come in a package, that you don’t just get the new airports, and I describe the package, though, they say no thank you.”
Finally, perhaps India too will get its Mideast invasions:
“As far as exporting democracy, it is only a matter of time before India gets the self-confidence to begin doing this.” [Subramanian Swamy, president of India’s Janata Party and former minister of law, commerce and justice]
A Citibank call center worker in Pune 
Richard Branson inaugurated the first London to Bombay route for Virgin Atlantic last Thursday (via 
Naeem Mohaiemen