New Delhi -- Several Indians were very excited on the night flight last Wednesday from Beijing to New Delhi. They were talking so loud that a Dutch had to be very rude to silence them.

"We Indians sometimes are too noisy," said Dr Arvinder Singh, resident economist at Centre for the Study of Developing Societies and honourary fellow at the Institute of Chinese Studies in New Delhi.

And so do the Chinese, so much so that the codes for conduct for Chinese tourists specially ask them to refrain from talking too loud in public.

This can arguably be one similar trait between the Indians and Chinese, but the questions for the similarities and differences between China and India or between the Chinese or Indians seem obvious but can still throw people off.

But the questions are asked time and again especially when top leaders of the two countries meet today to discuss issues of important concerns and when they are now constantly featured in the international media for their growths or problems.

"It is hard to avoid a comparison between the two," Dr Singh said.

"I believe China and India are two countries in the world that share the most in common," Sun Yuxi, Chinese ambassador to India, said in a group interview last Friday with Chinese journalists at his residence here.

China and India are two most populous countries in the world and both are located in Asia. Both are proud of their own individual long civilization that goes back some 5,000 years, but both suffered invasions and colonial rules, Sun said.

Both won true independence in the late 1940s and both advocated the principles of peaceful co-existence, China's top diplomat to India said.

Sun also pointed out that the Chinese and Indians share similar moral ideas.

In fact, the Chinese owe a lot to the Indians, Sun said. Some of the salient things Chinese, such as the belief that good things will come to you if you do good things, or the Shaolin kung fu, or even the Monkey King, can trace their origins to India.

Professor M. D. Nalapat, director of school of geopolitics at Manipal Academy of Higher Education in India, has his own way to discuss about the similarities and differences while responding to the questions in his email to China Daily.

"The chemistry of the people of the two countries are close to each other, without being similar to each other," he wrote.

The Indian professor said that "behind such superficial differences, there is an underlying unity of soul.

"Both peoples respect family and treasure sincerity. Both share a deep love for their land and culture. Both are peace-loving, and dislike violence," Prof Nalapat said. "They respond in the same way to different types of movies, liking those that have a happy ending and where the truthful and the just prevail over those who are strong but evil."

As to the differences, both Sun and Nalapat stress the two countries' dissimilarities in their political and administrative structures.

Economically they are different, too, although both are developing countries and have gone through periods of planned economy.

"India appears to have done far less in terms of exports and incoming foreign direct invest (FDI), the two variables key to China's success story," Dr Singh wrote in his thesis, "Comparisons between China and India," which was published last year in China & World Economy, an English language academy journal by the Institute of World Economics and Politics, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

However, "if the Indian economy, despite all the rhetoric of reforms/liberalization/opening up, has remained remarkably closed or inward-looking, and is likely to remain so for a long time, and still revolves around its domestic market capital and enterprises rather than having been led by exports and FDI or by its external sector, it is not necessarily a weakness," Dr. Singh observed.

The dissimilarities have become obstacles in mutual understanding.

"They often do not understand each other, and do not know how to realize the immense potential for collaboration and harmony between two civilizations that have survived continuously for more than four thousand years," Nalapat said.

Chen Wei, who has been studying at Jawahar Lal Nehru University since June as an exchange student, shared the same view.

There is still the lack of knowledge about China in India, Chen said.

The local news media have not been helpful, Chen said, as their reporting of China is often negative. "The Chinese media are comparatively more positive," Chen said.
Chinese knowledge of India is also limited, Dr Singh observed.

The library of the India Study Centre at Peking University does not have extensive collections on India, Singh said. The senior scholars invariably studied Sanskrit, which is no longer used in contemporary India.

Meanwhile, very few students study Indian languages. At Peking University, its Hindu language programme enrolls 10 students every four years, "because of the market reasons, perhaps," Singh noted, and they end up as interpreters for multinational or Indian companies or with the foreign affairs ministry.

Despite all this, "I have always believed that the peoples of China and India should work together as brothers and sisters," Prof Nalapat said. "A divided China-India equation makes the whole of Asia weak. A united India-China equation makes the entire continent strong."