The discussion on the book explores how long standing exchanges in trade, travel and ideas can shape future economic cooperation, ldeadership thinking and regional development.
R Gopalakrishnan
Author & Former Executive Director, Tata Sons Ltd
The more I talk about this book to outsiders, the more I feel it is important to point out that the subject — whether you agree with our book or not — is one of the most important for India in the coming thirty years. If we do not get clarity in our minds as to how India and China are going to work together, or if we continue to look at China only as a competitor rather than as a potential collaborator, then I think we are going to miss something vital in the vision of Viksit Bharat.
A lay person looking at the title might assume the book is about the philosophy of Chanakya and the philosophy of Sun Tzu. It is not. We could well have called it ‘India and China,’ but marketing has taught me that a little twist in the title helps. The subtitle gives away the plot: it is a business lens on what we call the three T’s — Trade, Travel and Thought. I consider it one of the most important perspectives that has rarely been expressed, because businessmen are trained to do one thing: look at a customer, assess what they need, place it in context, and then service it. Business people are naturally trained in what I call competitive collaboration. I may compete with you, but I can also collaborate with you — these are not mutually exclusive.
During my great-grandfather’s time, India and China together accounted for fifty percent of world GDP. That dwindled under our very noses, but it is now picking up for the first time, at different paces, in both countries. Consider the Valeriepieris circle — a circle drawn from a point in Myanmar with a radius of about three thousand kilometres. It encompasses much of China, much of India, parts of Siberia and Indonesia. More than half the people on this planet live within this circle, yet it covers only fifteen percent of the land area. If you lived in Bombay as I have for much of my life, you learn very quickly to get along with your neighbours — whether you like them or not.
China is not going to go away. It will be your neighbour forever. In Bombay, we have learned one thing: you had better be friendly with your neighbour. If you cannot be friendly, at least do not be an enemy. Learn to be frenemies. China and India were at the same place economically in 1980. Now China is five times bigger. Yet we need EVs, solar panels, and artificial intelligence. Near Nellore, there is a footwear factory called Apache Footwear — from twenty thousand pairs a month it has grown to production for two hundred million pairs for export. Why must it be entirely Chinese? Why cannot we do it with our own footwear people? There are many such examples, not just in high-tech. India should invest the time required to change the mindset — from saying we are competitors, to letting business carry on while the border conversation continues separately.
Nirmala Isaac
Co-Author; Doctoral Scholar in Organisational Behaviour, SPJIMR Mumbai
This is Gopal Sir’s twenty-first book and my very first, so if I fumble, please excuse me. When we started writing, I thought I was adequately informed. But the deeper I went into the literature, the more I realised I was very far from that. The relationship between India and China, when looked at through a modern lens — the last hundred years of geopolitics, border tensions, economics, even racism — is easy to get lost in. But the more I read, the more I realised that is just a blip in the long history of these two civilisations. One reader described our book as taking a helicopter ride through that long history. Let me take you on a short ride.
About two thousand years ago, in the northern plains of India, small kingdoms were rising and falling when an unlikely strategist called Chanakya stepped in. Legend tells us that after being humiliated at the court of a Nanda ruler, Chanakya untied the knot of hair on his head and issued an ultimatum: the next time he tied it, the king would no longer rule. He encountered Chandragupta Maurya — young, ambitious but in need of guidance — and together they overthrew the Nanda ruler. Chanakya then built not just a kingdom but a system: rules, regulations, law and order. He knew what remains true even today — exchange happens only in times of stability and not in times of chaos.
Ashoka’s transformation at the battlefield of Kalinga is another building block. Witnessing the dead and the weeping women, he felt remorse so deep that he turned to dharma and Buddhism. It was during his reign that Buddhism spread through the Mauryan Empire, into Central Asia, and then into China — one of the first bridges between the two civilisations. A few centuries later, a young Chinese monk named Xuanzang quietly left his homeland in 629 CE. He had heard about Buddhism from monks who had travelled from India and wanted to learn from the very source. He made the long arduous journey across Central Asia to Nalanda — one of the ancient world’s great universities — and spent more than a decade there, learning Sanskrit and Buddhist philosophy, eventually returning with hundreds of manuscripts.
One of my favourite characters to write about was Empress Wu — the only woman in Chinese history to rule as emperor. Under her reign, Buddhist institutions flourished: temples, translations, scholarly debates. Her story reminds us that ideas do not survive on inspiration alone. Sometimes they need monks, scholars, and systemic support. If Xuanzang represented China’s curiosity for Indian philosophy, Empress Wu represented institutional support. When you place these stories together — Chandragupta building political order, Ashoka spreading ideas, Xuanzang travelling for knowledge, and maritime exchanges linking ports across Asia — a pattern emerges. For centuries, the relationship between India and China was built on small, subtle exchanges of trade, travel and thought. Strategy is not just about conflict. The one takeaway from our book: we have to play the long game.
Shastri Ramachandaran
Independent Journalist, Editor, Writer & Media Consultant
I want to felicitate Mr Gopal and Ms Nirmala on a truly marvellous book — one of the finest books on China I have read in the last eighteen years, in which I have read far more books on China than all the other books I have ever read combined. What strikes me most is this: it would be very difficult for many people to read those books, distil the truth from their complexity, their depth, the many warps and wefts of history, civilisational issues, culture, prejudice. This book I would hold up as among the few I would recommend to anyone wanting to understand China — especially every Indian.
The second thing that makes this book exceptional is what it deliberately avoids. Everyone is obsessed with the border dispute or the boundary issue. I think it is a futile exercise to go on writing about it, speculating, debating, because eventually the state will decide — and the state has far more information than anyone else. The political leadership will decide not based on knowledge or insight but on what may work at a particular point in history. A G Noorani wrote that Nehru was held hostage by a divided cabinet, an irresponsible opposition, an uninformed press, and a restive parliament — all fed on bad history. I think we are still held hostage to the same thing.
Only people who have been in Bombay and away from Delhi could have written a book like this. Anyone based in Delhi, caught in that bureaucratic, diplomatic, militarised perception of China, could not have. Discussions on India-China in Delhi are always about militarisation, financialisation, deficits. What this book does instead is remind us, chapter by chapter, of a profound truth: India and China have far, far more in common to hold them together than the differences that divide them — differences that are very recent, not even colonial or postcolonial. And there is now the scholarship from Jindal Global University suggesting that the entire 1962 war was incited and sustained by the CIA because the United States wanted to keep these two countries at odds.
I ask: how much of this conflict is manufactured? It would be interesting to reflect on whether we have truly become a post-colonial society, or whether we are still trapped in a colonial perception of China as an enemy. Every chapter of this book underscores what I have also been struck by almost obsessively — that the relationship between India and China, for two thousand years, had no conflict. Common civilisation values, common heritage, common interests — none of these ever allowed for bilateral disputes until the 1940s and 1950s. Something changed. The question is whether it changed on its own, or was manufactured.
Questions & Answers
Q: How can integrating Chanakya’s wisdom and Sun Tzu’s strategy help India produce better management professionals?
Gopalakrishnan: The Chinese have a tremendous regard for history. When Xi Jinping addressed the CPC meeting, he quoted Sun Tzu and said the best battles are the ones you don’t fight. Mao quoted Confucius. So their deep respect for history runs very deep. As it happens, so does ours. Rather than taking down Chanakya Niti and Sun Tzu page by page, if you take this as a broad civilisational orientation — that there is wisdom embedded in our histories that shapes how we think, manage, and negotiate — you will probably come to the right answer. The book is not really about ancient philosophy; we used those names partly as a title with a bit of marketing in mind. The important point is that deep-rooted civilisational influences are working in our minds whether we know it or not — it may be the Mahabharata, the Ramayana, a story your grandmother told you.
Nirmala Isaac: I can add that in management education today, The Art of War and Chanakya Niti are already required reading in many strategic management courses. That prevalence is recognition that these frameworks carry enduring practical relevance.
Q: As co-author with a strong HR and organisational behaviour background, how did you translate historical insights into people and leadership practice?
Nirmala Isaac: To be honest, I did not bring a great deal of HR perspective into the book — except perhaps in talking about exchange and engagement. More than people practices, this book speaks to leadership through the lens of Chanakya Niti and The Art of War. But fundamentally, this is not an HR-oriented book. What I brought was a researcher’s curiosity — I was startled repeatedly by how little I knew when I thought I knew enough, and that humility drove the depth of the historical research behind it.
Q: From your extensive experience covering China and South Asia, how do you view the current trajectory of India-China relations?
Shastri Ramachandaran: India-China relations will find their own level regardless of what the states and governments do. Let me give you a concrete example. There is almost no major construction taking place anywhere in India where goods are not imported from China — from sanitary ware to nails and nuts and bolts. A hotelier from Karnataka told me he sources everything for his three-star hotel from Guangzhou, with delivery to Bangalore costing just a thousand dollars. Meanwhile, Chinese LED lights have illuminated rural India in a way no domestic industry managed for decades. Trade is like water — put an obstacle in front of it and it finds its way around. Neither the Indian nor the Chinese state is particularly interested in people of the two countries really coming close — banning apps after Galwan hurt the young Indians who earned their living on TikTok, while TikTok itself went on to do excellent business in America. The geopolitical noise is loud, but at the ground level, exchange is already happening and will keep happening. The question for Indian managers is whether they are positioned to be part of it.
