There exists a large body of research concerning inequality but a long-term comparative political economy analysis of inequality, based on a unified framework, for two of the rising stars of contemporary global capitalism – China and India – is virtually absent. The book Class and Inequality in China and India, 1950-2010 by Vamsi Vakulabharanam fills that important gap. Deploying a uniquely designed class-framework, inspired by the Marxian ideas and accommodating country-specific complexities, this research provides an empirically rich and theoretically well-founded comparative analysis of inequality for these two countries over the period of 1950 to early 2010s. It helps us understand, how, inter alia, the relative power positions of various socio-economic classes, their interactions and conflicts, influence changes in institutions and government policies which in turn affects inequality.Class and Inequality in China and India, 1950–2010, Vamsi Vakulabharanam, Oxford University Press, 2024.It also sheds light on how the nature of growth and inequality are inter-linked and what determines who benefits from growth and who does not. While in most popular conversations on inequality, the central role of neoliberal capitalism remains unspoken about, this book convincingly argues that neoliberal capitalism has the potential to cause surprising convergences between countries in terms of trends and nature of inequality, overriding various nation-specific fundamental differences.Upon providing criticisms of the famous Kuznet’s hypothesis and Thomas Piketty’s theoretical framework, at the very outset, the author proposes an alternative theoretical framework to analyse inequality in any country. He argues that a comprehensive explanation of within-country inequality needs to rely on – a. spatial aspect (inequality within and between regions, within-rural, within-urban, and between urban and rural); b. class-based account (inequality within- and between-classes and relative income/wealth position of various classes); and c. situating the country in the context of global capitalism (exploring the two-way causality – how the national and global dynamics affect each other). Proposing an alternative theoretical framework, empirically presenting the analysis at these three levels, and carefully weaving them together, are among the most valuable contributions of the book. Another important contribution of the book is providing a class-based analysis of inequality, especially in the Chinese case. The discourse on inequality in China has primarily focused on spatial inequality. This book, deploying the class-based approach, carefully delineates the interactions among various equalising and dis-equalising tendencies to explain the diminishing inequality trend during Mao’s period. It demonstrates how following the regime change since the late-1970s and early-1980s, the nature of growth and associated class-relations altered dramatically. While inequality rose considerably across regions, and between rural and urban sectors, spatial inequality alone does not capture the entire story. According to the author, as the Chinese economy transforms itself from being a state-centred to private capitalist-centred one, classes of owners, managers, and urban professionals consolidate their power and benefit disproportionately as compared to other classes including urban workers, and farmers/peasantry. In the Indian context too, there are novel insights. This book unravels the class-nature of the apparent decline in inequality, generally agreed upon in the literature, between 1950 to early-1980s. Unlike in Mao’s China, in India, this fall in inequality did not emanate from any radical institutional changes. Instead, the relative decline of the richest group (top 10%) was replaced by the rise of the ‘middle’ groups. In rural India, despite the intent of the Union government to curtail inequality – a. agricultural policies, a matter of state governments, were influenced by the provincial landed elites; b. attempts to redistribute land remained largely ineffective and cooperative initiatives did not flourish as much. Later policies such as bank nationalisation, Green Revolution effectively helped the rich and middle farmers. The benefits did not percolate down to the poorest – small and marginal farmers, and landless workers. One wonders if some of these structural issues culminated in the political imperatives behind Garibi Hatao. The inequality trend in urban India was no different either. State protection helped the capitalist class to thrive, professional employees in both public and private sector experienced significant improvement, and workers in the organised sector also witnessed some improvement in their economic position. But, the poorest 40% of the urban population comprising workers in the unorganised sector, artisans, workers in small establishments, and self-employed urban dwellers benefitted the least. The decline in overall inequality masks that the fall in income share of the richest 10% accrued mostly to the middle 40%, leaving very little scope for improvement of the bottom 50%, specifically the poorest 10%. Conceptualising and empirically demonstrating the rise of the ‘middle’ in both rural and urban India and unpacking its constituents in class-terms, during a period generally celebrated for diminished disparities, is a vital contribution to Indian inequality literature.The inequality trends and class-dynamics in both China and India, presents a curious case. For both these countries, since the 1980s, the book shows a rise in dominance of two distinct classes – owners and managers and urban professionals – forming the exclusive group of urban elites. In some parts of India, rural elites found ways to urbanise themselves becoming part of the urban elites. In this class-contest, the losing classes are urban workers, informal sector, small and marginal farmers, landless workers. Further, in the case of China, the book presents in great detail the region wise class-dynamics. Contrary to the official silence on growing class-inequality, the book discusses the linkage between political and economic elites in China. Surprisingly, while there are considerable differences, until early 1980s, between China and India in terms of extent and nature of changes in inequality, striking similarities emerge thereafter, notwithstanding the otherwise fundamental socio-political differences between them. Based on a detailed class-analysis of inequality the book builds this puzzle and the author, of course, does not leave the reader with a cliff-hanger. The later part of the book, engaging critically with the literature of comparative political economy and utilizing international trade data at great length, illuminates how economic systems and regimes of accumulation are critical in explaining within-country inequality which cannot be analysed without situating the respective country in the context of global capitalism and exploring the two-way interactions between the country and the world economy. Note that, though this book compares broadly two long periods – 1950-1980 and 1980-2010, the endeavour digs deeper, constructing multiple sub-periods within each long-period, enriching the reader with valuable insights on respective class-conflict and subsequent inequality changes. This also helps us better understand how the relative power positions of various classes in the society influences policies and how different policies impact distributional dynamics from time to time. For example, in the Indian context, it shows how MGNREGA caused a definitive check on the burgeoning inequality, even within the neoliberal regime. Not to forget, as the author emphasises, the inequality numbers presented in this book are underestimations of the actual scenario due to the well-known limitations of respective official data. The narrative in the book will only be further strengthened if careful data is collected on the super-rich. While due to lack of comparable survey data (in India) this book restrains itself up to early 2010s, the book offers some relevant reflections on the possible changes in inequality in China and India since then. There is scope to update this account with further research and later data. On multiple occasions, as the book deals with the role of government behind class-based inequality dynamics, it evokes some interesting questions about the state-capital relation in two entirely different countries, the answers to which however remains beyond the scope of this book. Further, there are some noticeable differences in the way Chinese and Indian stories are presented. But, that leaves the main argument undisturbed.This book is a tough read, loaded with numbers and theoretical engagements. But the devil is in the detail and rigour. So, it appears that the author had to make a difficult trade-off: on the one hand, it is an academic book meant for scholars and on the other, it also speaks to people beyond academia in the way the chapters are organised, and the main arguments are presented. Apart from the usual suspects – researchers and students of political economy – political commentators, concerned citizens and open-minded reflective policy makers would find this book very informative and insightful.Saswata Guha Thakurata is an assistant professor at the Department of Economics in FLAME University, Pune.