In response to the ‘Boycott Chinese products’ which has seen a lot of traction in the last couple of days, Chinese experts have said it’s quite difficult for Indians to boycott Chinese products that are of high quality.
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“The border tensions between China and India are not serious at all and both governments are taking a cautious attitude, but Indian media and nationalist figures tend to spread disinformation that is aimed at slandering China,” said Zhao Gancheng, a research fellow at the Shanghai Institute for International Studies.
Multiple people and organisations have called for a complete boycott of Chinese products in response to the Chinese aggression on the Ladakh border in the past few weeks.
Sonam Wangchuk, an Indian engineer, innovator and education reformist who became popular after the release of the movie 3 Idiots, where Aamir Khan’s character was inspired by him. Wangchuk urged citizens to give up all Chinese products. “Give up all Chinese software in a week, all Chinese hardware in a year,” Wangchuk said in the recent video.
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Meanwhile, the apex trade body, the Confederation of All India Traders (CAIT), representing 7 crore traders and 40,000 trade associations, launched a national campaign to boycott all the Chinese products from June 10.
“To achieve this goal, CAIT has prepared a comprehensive list of about 3000 products imported from China for which Indian substitutes and alternatives are easily available and customers of India will also not mind because all those things are already made in India,” said the CAIT secretary-general, Praveen Khandelwal and National President, B.C. Bhartia.
As reported earlier by EurAsian Times, the “Remove China Apps” was pulled down by Google Play Store, two weeks after its launch. The app enabled users to detect where any apps on their phones were from and delete them if desired, according to its developer.
The hashtag #BoycottChineseProducts was trending on Twitter, with many Indians pledging to stop using Chinese products.
Chinese analysts Ma Jingjing and Shen Weiduo wrote in the Chinese state mouthpiece, Global Times (GT), that Indians can hardly resist buying Chinese quality goods.
“This is not the first time some Indians had threatened to boycott Chinese products. The threats are heard whenever China-India relations fluctuate,” said Lou Chunhao, deputy director of the Institute of South Asian Studies at the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations.
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It also said that the rise of anti-China sentiment in India is due to Indian nationalists’ attempt to deliberately smear and defame China. Chinese analysts observed that calls to boycott Chinese products are likely to fail as these items, which have become pervasive in Indian daily life, are difficult to replace.
“Although the Modi government aims to boost India’s manufacturing sector, it accounts for only 16 percent of India’s GDP now,” said Lou, adding that India’s demand for Chinese products will be there and won’t go away.
“The boycott China call is a popular sentiment among the people of India. It’s not that the government has made any announcement regarding this. People today genuinely feel they should boycott products that are made in China. There is anger towards China,” said Ram Madhav, BJP General Secretary.
The article in GT also mentions that Chinese experts warned that the “remove made-in-China products campaign” will add more burdens for local Indian people as cost-efficient Chinese products are better market choices.
