The irony of this story caught my attention:

“Beijing: An outsourcing centre to streamline the application process for Indian visa was inaugurated at Guanzhou city in Guangdong province on Friday.

The process of applying for an Indian visa will be outsourced to the new India Visa Application Centre, Consul General of India Gautam Bambawale said at a function in Guanzhou.

The inauguration of the centre comes a week after the new Consulate General of India was opened in Guangzhou.

The centre, to be run by GZL International in consultation with VFS Global Services, will commence operations from June 16, catering to visa applicants from Guangdong, Yunnan, Sichuan, Fujian, Hainan and Hunan provinces and Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region. “We at the Consulate General of India, Guangzhou, are already issuing about 100 visas every day. We expect this figure to grow exponentially in the coming months,” Mr. Bambawale said.”

Beyond the obvious point that the Indian government is outsourcing visa processing to a Chinese company, I think that this story illustrates the truly global nature of China’s aspirations.  Chinese businesses clearly view India as both a place to learn from and a rapidly developing market.  At this moment, there are probably discussions in Chinese offices that start off something like this, “India has 1.13 billion people. If we could get each of them to buy 10 RMB worth of our wonderful stuff…”

Technorati Tags:  India, Globalization, China, China Outsourcing