Removing Chinese apps from your own phone may be the opposite of self-reliance
The most crucial takeaway from Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman’s insights from ‘Thinking Fast and Slow’ is that the human brain has two systems, System one and System two. The former is proficient at ‘fast thinking’, which depends on our instincts and emotions to come quickly to conclusions quickly. Kahneman refers to the latter as slow thinking, which is more deliberate and logical in its approach.
If I ask you to compute two plus two for me personally, System one will immediately throw up the answer. But if I request you to manually multiply five thousand nine hundred four by twenty-eight thousand 500 and ninety, you will automatically engage System two. There are several tasks to which System one is way better suited to, while there are certainly others for which you need to count on System two. When you end up using the incorrect system for the incorrect task, you'll likely end up with the incorrect answer.
The recent massive push online to ban Chinese software (and products), is a classic case of using System someone to analyse a problem that is better fitted to System two. It is evident why the push has momentum. Given the existing state of world affairs, along with the Huawei controversies that dominated context before, you will find a deep-seated mistrust of the Chinese. So whenever we look at TikTok’s content moderation problems or hear the Prime Minister discuss our dependence on self-reliance, we put two and two together and make the case that China is a bad actor. Thus, it seems sensible for all of us to ban Chinese products and software and really should look elsewhere for our needs.
In terms of anticipating consequences in changes to public policy, relying on system you can be counterproductive and even dangerous. At the peak of animosity towards Chinese apps, among the fastest-growing apps on the Play Store was called ‘Remove China Apps’ and did precisely what the name suggested.
As the App has since that time been taken off the Play Store for violating Google’s policies, its existence and function hurt India’s needs in the name of helping it. In the event you continue to delete Chinese programs from your own phone, the earnings from the consumption of the apps will not magically come to India.
There are two anticipated but unintended second-order effects to doing this. Firstly, there is every chance a ban on Chinese software may not succeed. A key reason behind that is because people can download apps even without the utilization of the App/Play store. Sure the procedure could be non-trivial, but if someone really wants to continue using TikTok and will get their hands on an operating application package from a source other than the app store, there is no reason why their phones will won't run it.
Secondly, as may be the underlying premise of so many economics lectures at Takshashila, eliminating or banning a competitor is inherently bad for competition and does Indian consumers a disservice. Not merely will this give American counterparts to each of the apps mentioned previously a boost, but creative destruction for the Indian digital ecosystem will also get delayed, as Indian applications that was not performing well get an extension. Rohin Dharmakumar at The Ken, wrote an outstanding piece called ‘China’s India problem is India’s China problem’ that does well to show the scale of the impact. According to the analysis, China ranks second to the united states in the amount of ‘Top 100’ free and paid applications on the Play Store.
Also, China isn't only competing with directly owned apps, but it is also investing heavily in Indian firms. According to Dharmakumar, the very best 10 Indian companies by total venture funding all have a Chinese venture investor. And the list has some household names, including PayTM, Ola, Oyo, Swiggy, and Big Basket.
Removing these companies from the app store will make us worse off, while simultaneously doing the united states a favour. China’s investments in the Indian digital economy are a major part of the reason the software ecosystem is competitive. As a result, the market allows us to expect better working software providing us better quality of services. Hence, it really is in our best interests to maintain a level playing field.
Should we remove competition for the united states it would release market share for Google Pay, Uber, Amazon’s impending food delivery service (because Zomato also offers Chinese investors), and Amazon Fresh. The main point is, for some American tech giants, there exists a Chinese substitute.
And it is hard to generate a case for how American companies and platforms are objectively much better than Chinese alternatives. Yes, there is implicit pomp about Silicon Valley to be making the world a much better place, and American companies have already been recognized to have a holier than thou attitude. But an American company is as likely as a Chinese one in terms of collecting and selling your computer data to get income and generate wealth for their shareholders. When you have been scanning this while engaging system one, there is a chance that none of the arguments makes sense to you. China seems such as a suspicious actor and banning Chinese apps, on the facial skin of it, should suggest to them. But removing Chinese software from your phones is likely likely to hurt India’s digital economy more than it would China’s. And that is the opposite of what this means to be self-reliant.
