Why Dhaka understands Washington or Delhi, but not Beijing

When Zohran Mamdani secured his earth-shaking victory in New York's local elections, it dominated talk shows and social media feeds in Dhaka for weeks.

Dhaka knows its American culture wars; it knows who Tucker Carlson is, and it tracks the controversies surrounding figures like Charlie Kirk with bizarrely intimate precision. Policymakers in Bangladesh also have clear ideas about who the key players are in the US State Department and its South Asia desk.

The same holds true for Bangladesh's immediate neighbour, India. The political manoeuvres of entry-level state politicians in West Bengal or Assam are parsed over morning newspapers. Every statement made by leaders of the BJP, Congress and the newly launched CJP is followed keenly by avid readers in Dhaka.

Local YouTube influencers and movie celebrities from across the border are household names, and the labyrinthine nature of Delhi's central bureaucracy is deeply understood by Bangladeshi policymakers.

Yet, when it comes to the nation's most critical economic partner, this hyper-awareness vanishes into a profound, echoing silence.

Despite a massive surge in Bangladeshi politicians, entrepreneurs and students travelling to China, the country remains almost entirely unknown territory. To the public imagination in Dhaka, China is a monolith.

We know its President, Xi Jinping. We know the leaders who made modern China. We can name a few of its largest tech conglomerates and perhaps their billionaire CEOs, such as Jack Ma of Alibaba. Beyond that, Bangladesh is drawing a blank.

There is almost zero understanding in Dhaka of how China actually works on a structural level. How do its powerful provincial governments operate? How do its state and regional bureaucracies make high-stakes infrastructure decisions, and how do Chinese engineers plan projects with such ruthless precision?

Most importantly, how did its cities transform themselves into the world's most advanced metropolises in less than four decades? How did its policymakers bring 800 million people out of poverty in four decades?

A tale of two plans

For decades, Bangladesh has dutifully adopted its own Five-Year Development Plans and scores of industrial, export and investment policies or guidelines.

Yet, under scrutiny, these documents reveal themselves to be little more than ineffective wish lists—bureaucratic "copy-paste" exercises unable to steer the country toward its coveted economic milestones.

Contrast this with Beijing. China's central planning is terrifyingly effective. Its successive Five-Year Plans have systematically guided the country from a poor and overwhelmingly agrarian economy—wracked by colossal political blunders that cost the lives of millions—into a formidable global superpower in technology, defence and manufacturing.

While Bangladesh struggles to implement basic infrastructure projects on time, China's state-directed planning has established undisputed global supremacy in cutting-edge industries: artificial intelligence, advanced semiconductors, electric vehicles (EVs), robotics, and pharmaceutical manufacturing.

Nowhere is this divergence clearer than in a historical comparison between the city of Shenzhen and Bangladesh's ready-made garment (RMG) industry. Both began their modern journeys at the exact same time, in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Forty years ago, Shenzhen was a sleepy fishing village of a few thousand people. Today, because of highly adaptable local governance and relentless engineering foresight, it is a global hardware hub home to over 15 million people, churning out the world's most sophisticated electronics. Some call it China's Silicon Valley.

Meanwhile, Bangladesh's garment sector has largely stalled in its evolutionary track. The country remains trapped in the same low-value manufacturing it occupied in the 1980s, relying almost exclusively on cheap, low-skilled labour to make basic, low-margin apparel.

The structural failure to learn from China's economic model has prevented Bangladesh from graduating into middle-tier engineering or advanced manufacturing.

As Bangladesh navigates its status as a developing nation, looking west or toward Delhi for political gossip is a luxury it can no longer afford. If Dhaka wishes to replicate the economic miracles of the 21st century, it must finally pull back the curtain and understand the intricate bureaucratic and engineering machinery of the Red Dragon.

—

Shafiqul Alam is the editor of Daily Waadaa