India is thrilled. It has more billionaires than Japan, indeed, more than any other Asian country. I doubt Japan cares much but China is shocked. China's dictators know that a successfully modernizing India means that they no longer can argue effectively that tyranny is the price of prosperity. That is the reason the Chinese have been trying to hide India's success from their own people but Forbes billionaires list revealed the truth :

Indians topping the Forbes' list of Asian billionaires, replacing the Japanese, have flabbergasted the Chinese, who are regularly reading that India is not shining as reported by the Western media and experts.

"I am surprised that Indians have topped the Forbes' list of Asian billionaires," Chen Yu, a media consultant said.

"I must change my distorted impressions about India," she said. . . .

Compared to the impressive performance by Indian entrepreneurs, the only mainland Chinese to figure among the top 70 richest amongst Asians was Yan Cheung, the self-made woman entrepreneur of Nine Dragon Paper Co, who is the richest in China. Ting Guo, an executive with a multinational company said, India's rise is also as impressive as that of China but mostly went unreported or underreported in the Chinese media. Zhang Jing, a Chinese journalist with the China Information World also said that she was unaware of India's growth story and had a good impression of the software sector. Of late, the state-run Chinese media, especially the Communist Party-backed 'Global Times' has been writing a lot of stories, telling the Chinese readers that India was not shining as reported in a section of the Western media.