FORTUNE magazine on why India will eventually outperform China

While the argument is based on some specious assumptions (such as China's current regime will make horrible decisions similar to Mao's Great Leap Forward or Cultural Revolution), an analysis in today's FORTUNE magazine says political freedom is crucial to leading economic power. It's a good point. Consider that, despite growing at double-digit rates for a decade and glistening East Coast cities like Shanghai, China is still very much a third-world country. Can it reach first-world economic power without opening up its political system? That's the angle from which you have to read the FORTUNE article. Here's a crucial excerpt:

At some point, a market economy requires a reasonably open and flexible political order. In China, that implies the end of the Communist Party's monopoly of power, or at least the chance to challenge it without being imprisoned. China's rulers are nowhere near countenancing that.

For all the advances in personal freedom in China over the past 15 years - and these have been enormous - the Communist Party's clenched grip on power has not relaxed. It's a whole lot less traumatic for a democratic country to open its economy, as India is doing, than for a dictatorship to open its politics, as China is not doing.

And that's why, a generation or so down the line, it is India that is going to be the Asian tiger that everyone watches.