By David Dodwell  

Despite the rest of world trying to club China and India together, the two remain at odds rather than agree on most issues. Most Western economists bundle India and China together with Brazil and Russia (BRIC) without pausing to think what they actually have in common.

At the Doha Round of WTO talks that have been dragging on for sometime now, China and India are more often than not seen as reflecting the views of a unified developing world. The same is true in case of preparations for the Copenhagen climate change conference in December.

To most people looking at Asia from the comforts of Western Europe or the US, the similarities between the countries seem more obvious than their differences. Once upon a time, this probably did not matter.

Despite their huge populations, the impact of the two countries on global diplomacy was minimal for many decades of the 20th century. But today, the international community has already accepted China's importance. Soon the same could become true about India.

This makes it all the more important for Western leaders to give priority to understanding the subtleties of the two countries, and they can start by recognizing their similarities and differences.

At a personal level, this Western naivety has been frustrating to me. As a young journalist opening the Financial Times (FT) bureau in Hong Kong in 1983, I spent hundreds of hours trying in vain to persuade my seniors at FT headquarters in London that we needed to prioritize our news coverage of China and east Asia, rather than India, where millions of pounds were being poured to print locally, and build a strong local circulation.

My arguments that China, rather than India, had the commitment necessary to engage with the global economy, and a quality of economic pragmatism that provided a unique fertile environment for trade and investment, fell on deaf ears.