This book and its companion volume offer a better understanding of the lessons that Indian policymakers can learn from China's economic experience over the last 40 years. The aim of the two books together is to evaluate China's incremental reforms and how these reforms have impacted on the Chinese economy, based on a classical rather than from a neoclassical perspective using a case study method. In this first volume, the author examines India's emergence from socialism and central planning as being in sharp contrast to China's experience, and considers how we might compare the institutional difference between the countries. It also covers a theoretical grounding for the comparison of the two largest populated countries in the world, which will be taken up by the second volume.