Can Prime Minister Modi do for India what Deng Xiaoping did 30 years ago for China and make India a technology and economic superpower of the world. Communist China which went through testing times under socialist rulers till the seventies and has grown to become an economic power house after some gut wrenching struggle for liberalization. The Chinese struggle for liberal economic policies was extremely intense for over three decades as the architect of modern China Deng Xiaoping was repeatedly thwarted and purged first by Mao in 1967 and then by the Gang of Four in 1975.

It was only after the death of Mao in September 1976 that his successor Hua Guofeng brought Deng Xiaoping back to the center stage who ultimately went to replace him and put China on to the growth path. Between 1979 to 2010 the GDP of China grew by an average of 9.9% peaking during 1984 when it touched 15.4%. It’s per capita GDP ( Purchasing Power Parity ) rose sharply from a lowly $ 299 in 1980 to $9171 thirty years later.

Operating with statesmanship, foresight and political acumen through consensus, compromise, and persuasion, Deng engineered important reforms in virtually all aspects of China’s political, economic, and social life. However he understood the limitations of the Chinese Politburo and the bureaucracy and chose a group of four engineers under physicist and engineer Wang Ganchang to conceive ‘The State High Tech Development Plan’. This was popularly known as the 863 program named after the year and month of its conception and laid down the ground for the economic and technology development of modern China.

The seven key technology areas that laid down the roadmap of modern China in 1986 was New Materials, Biotechnology, Space, Information Technology, Laser Technology, Automation and Energy. Some of these were green field areas about which the Chinese knew very little in the eighties and the rest of the world did not discover the complexities till much later. It was indeed surprising how China steadily gained a position of ascendency in all these critical areas quietly but surely with planning, investment and clinical execution. A look at just one of these sectors shows the vision of Deng, his emphasis on long term planning and execution that has made China the irreplaceable factory of the world and a economic super power.

One of these areas was the ‘new materials’ or rare earth minerals which is critical to the electronics, the semi conductor industry, the aero space and defence sector. It was not till three decades later in 2010 that the world woke up to the scare of China’s mining monopoly when it nearly doubled the price of 17 rare earth materials in 2010. While the world was in slumber, China had quietly acquired 93% of the rare earth mines across the world without fan fare. It had also set up the complex intermediate processing centre’s for ore benefaction and separation to produce the materials needed for making electro magnets and other critical components that is the backbone of the modern electronics industry.

When investors across the world panicked and pumped in billions of dollars to set up new rare earth mines across the world, they found that they did not have the capability to set up the nine stage process needed to separate the ores and bring them out as usable materials for the production stage. While a class 10 chemistry student will understand the complexity of separation of minerals it is still very difficult for the rest of the world to discover today the thousand plus chemical separation processes that takes place in separating rare earth metals and building environmentally friendly industrial capacities for each of the processes.

The $ 1.5 billion Molycorp Inc. set up by panicky investors to mine and process rare earths in California’s Mojave desert still sends neodymium and samarium from its giant deposits for processing to China which alone has developed processes for the entire process supply chain. It is an extremely complex world of high tech chemistry that has been developed by China during the last thirty years that the world has no clue about. As Beijing dreams of graduating from the component supplier to the equipment supplier to the world and is no longer interested in selling cheap, the world is waking up to Deng’s vision which has made China the irreplaceable factory of the world.

China’s global leadership in technology fronts from horizontal drilling to biotechnology, from laser ammunition to automation of construction processes is the result of Deng’s 863 program that was set in concrete thirty years ago. Deng’s precision planning through the low profile 863 program covered the entire gamut in each area. For example in the transport sector they covered every process and every component that is needed to build high speed electric trains to low speed electric bikes that take China’s factory and farm worker to his work place. They went about their work discretely and have dozens of surprises stored up their sleeves that the world will come to witness in the years to come. Can Modi after his China visit quietly set about a long term process of technology development in India without too much fan fare?