Illustration by Jillian Tamaki
In 1956, China started building a road through Aksai Chin, a remote region of the Himalayas claimed by India. When Indian leaders learned about the move—which, due to the area's inaccessibility, didn't happen until a couple of years later—they were incensed. By 1962, the two countries were battling it out between the peaks of the Himalayas in what's now known as the Sino-Indian War. Today, though shelling has stopped, the border dispute persists. Every few years, there's a diplomatic row that serves, more than anything else, to keep political and cultural exchanges between these two neighboring giants to a minimum.
There may be an opening, however, as both nations realize their mutual scientific ambitions. China and India both possess rich science-cultural legacies: Prior to the 15th century when the European renaissance surged, the Chinese were consistent technological and scientific innovators, while among other significant advances, Indian mathematicians invented the decimal system. Today, both China and India are focusing heavily on scientific investment—China in areas like stem cell research and nanoscience and India in information technology. As these two nations strive to develop and innovate, they have started to look across their fractious frontier and agree to work together for mutual scientific gain.
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In 2005, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao visited Indian tech hub Bangalore to promote Sino-Indian cooperation in technology. The next year, Chinese and Indian science ministers signed a memorandum of understanding that outlined cooperation in areas like agriculture, biotechnology, and health. A few months later, both presidents—each a scientist by training—agreed to promote science and technology as one of ten key areas of cooperation between the two nations. And in October of last year, during a trip to Beijing's top science school, Tsinghua University, Indian Congress President Sonia Gandhi proposed that through science the two countries were forging a relationship based on "pragmatism and mutual self-interest."
The implications of pooling the two countries' strengths—drawing on what Wen terms the "two pagodas" of China's hardware and India's software—could be profound. China and India are the two most populous nations on earth, together comprising 38 percent of the world's population. They're teaming up in areas in which they have been historically strong to bolster already impressive industrial and economic growth. But the potential policy lessons of such science and technology sharing might deliver their own long-term results. With the entire developing world looking to China and India as leaders, a successful commitment to social and economic development based on science transfer could have wide-ranging influence. In Africa, Southeast Asia, South America and the Middle East, moves are being made to adopt science development and diplomacy approaches, but the uptake has been, in many cases, slow. Scientific cooperation between the two largest developing nations on Earth that are still technically at war, in short, is the kind of endorsement that science diplomacy and development analysts want to see. That the power of scientific thinking might overcome the posturing of political diplomacy on such a large scale bodes well, not just for the Indians and Chinese, but for the global science culture.
"Scientists can play a very valuable role in increasing and helping maintain engagement," says Vaughan Turekian, chief international officer for the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Science, he adds, can "be a catalyst for getting other things accomplished." Before China, India used science to make tentative overtures toward Pakistan, with which it has fought three wars since 1947. In 2004, the science ministers of the two countries met for first time in Delhi to outline cooperation in nanotech, biotech, and information technology. "I am here to build bridges," Pakistan's minister for science, technology, and higher education Atta ur-Rahman told Science from the sidelines of the talks. The following year, an earthquake in Kashmir prompted the countries to cooperate on seismology—turning a disputed area into a source of cooperation.