Well this shows the strength of the Indian trade fraternity. It took China 13 years after implementing economic policies to come to the level of a closed market economy like India. Then started the China boom. In 1991 when we were about to go bankcrupt we opened our markets, by that time China had all the infrastructure to clock such growth. The Indian boom has just started but will need effective policies to maintain it.
In China, the infrastructure in 1991 is no much different from 1979, because China simply didn't have money to do that in 1991.
Let me tell you the footsteps of the development of Chinese economy. It is not quite accurate, just based on my memory.
1979, "Open economic policy" was adopted, which means people can have small businesses for making living, for example, street hawkers(used to be considered crime). Except for that, nothing changed.
After 1986, state owned chinese companies, were allowed to do business with foreign companies.(Actually, there were no private Chinese companies at all at that time.) And major foreign companies were allowed to open their business in China. The real Chinese economic reform started from this year. Also, infrastructure started improving since then althogh very very slowly.
1994, the Chinese government started to take "market economy" methodology, although it is far from a free market economy. (China had a planned economy until this year). Actually, there are many private companies established as early as 1990. Infrastructure still kept improving slowly.
1994-2002, China totally opened its gate to the world. The quality of common Chinese people's life were getting better and better. People are more and more open minded, money-driven. Big infrastructure projects were going on in Shanghai. But house prices there were quite low, and there were lots of empty apartments and office buildings in Shanghai. The stock price was low, and no signs of going up at all. Many state owned factories went bankrupt as they could not compete with new comers in the market, which gave Chinese banks big risks of bankruptcy too.
2003, after the SARS crisis, the big economic boom started. After years of international market exploration, money from everywhere flow into China. Now the real infrastructure revolution also started. In 2007 in Shanghai, house prices tripled as compared to 2003.
2008, exporting business recession. A lot of Chinese companies were impacted. The Chinese government decided to put more money into building infrastructure to help the economy recover as quickly as possible.
2009, I can feel the development pace was much quicker than 2008
2010, a big wow for me. I really cannot believe it, money money money!
2011, not much different from 2010, but some people told me it will slow down after June. Let's cross our fingers.
Right now, 94% of Chinese companies are privately owned. Let's look back to 1990 since the first private Chinese company established. What a long way!