NEW DELHI -- While I was in India recently, the first phase of an underground railway was inaugurated in New Delhi. At about the same time, in Shanghai, the world's first magnetic levitation train was inaugurated between the airport and the city. This is a fitting metaphor for the two countries. China is outperforming India in almost every facet of national competitiveness -- from attracting more than 10 times as much foreign capital as India and increasing market share in world trade to being courted as a responsible manager of world order.

While keeping costs as low and offering the lure of a market as big as India's, China has attained levels of infrastructure closer to those of Southeast Asia. Some of India's long-standing advantages over China are also eroding or becoming less relevant, including English-language competency, democracy and the rule of law.

Where China no longer allows ideology to get in the way of national interests, and its version of "socialism with Chinese characteristics" is starting to embrace capitalists within the fold of the Communist Party, significant pockets of Indians remain resolutely opposed to letting national interests prevail over ideologically defined principles. One of the architects of India's liberalization said to me that India joined the World Trade Organization grudgingly, not out of conviction but because there was little choice left. By contrast, China has embraced the WTO as a key tool in imposing an external discipline for achieving domestic policy reforms that the national leadership sees as critical to economic success.