For all their economic, geostrategic and philosophical differences, India and China share more than headline economists tend to admit: huge (if declining) populations; civilisational depth; and hyper-nationalist troll armies prowling their respective cyberspheres. The troll’s stock in trade is insults, but beneath the mutual contempt, the armies on either side of the border display a similar appetite for avenging historical humiliations.Both countries have built their modern iterations on the scaffolding of subjugation at the hand of outsiders. Since gaining independence in 1947, India’s nation-building project has tended to lean on the two centuries of British rule that supplanted Mughal authority for its narrative glue. In China, the “century of humiliation” has served a comparable purpose. This is the hundred years bookended by the First Opium War of 1839–42 and the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949, taught on the mainland as a saga of Qing decline, warlordism, and the extraterritorial carve-ups inflicted by Western powers, Russia and Japan.This shared vocabulary of grievance undergirded the brief Hindi-Chini bhai-mance of the 1950s, as the two nations sought to forge post-colonial identities in a new, “non-aligned” world. The friendship didn’t survive the decade – thanks to the 1962 border war – but the reflex of tallying historical affronts proved more durable.Fast forward to the present day, and not only are these humiliations still doing the heavy lifting in rallying nationalist sentiment, but there are constituencies within both nations busy re-dating their victimhood, further and further back in time. In India, two centuries of colonial rule have, in the words of India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, himself, become “a thousand years of slavery.”The Mughals, whose language, architecture (the Taj Mahal, the Red Fort) and cuisine are interwoven into what Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, described as India’s palimpsest, “each new layer inscribed without erasing what came before,” are increasingly equated with the extractive East India Company.The Qing dynasty and ‘three-hundred-year’ subjugationIn China, a parallel recalibration is under way online under the banner of the “1644 historical view.” This line of thinking, popularised across social media platforms like Bilibili and Weibo, holds that China’s true humiliations began not with the Opium Wars, but in 1644, when the ethnically Manchu Qing overthrew the Han Ming. In effect, the 268 years the Qing dynasty was in power are recast as a foreign occupation, making the “century of humiliation” only the final act of a much longer, “three-hundred-year” subjugation. This even though by the time the Qing had finished conquering the Central Plains they had adopted Ming bureaucracy, the examination system and Confucian statecraft wholesale.The mood spilled into the open earlier in the year with The Belief, a state-backed war film about the Qing navy’s 1683 conquest of a Ming-loyalist regime in Taiwan. Most observers believe the film was intended to prime audiences for Beijing’s own possible “reunification” with Taiwan by casting the Qing’s absorption of the island as a historical rehearsal. It backfired. Online audiences interpreted the film as the Manchu ‘other’ crushing heroic Han resistance. Late last year, Chigua Mengzhu, a Douyin influencer’s posts on Qing “atrocities” won her five million followers in a single month, before the platform banned her. And there continue to be online conspiracy theories that claim that Manchu Chinese are overrepresented in the entertainment industry.Illustration: Pariplab ChakrabortyAt first glance, the Mughal-Qing parallel is neatly symmetrical. Both movements take a ruling dynasty that has traditionally been understood as domesticated – having built the infrastructure and monuments of its adopted homeland, patronised local languages and art, and intermarried until its foreignness gradually blurred into belonging – and rebranded it as occupation. Both narratives use the language of anti-colonial grievance applied retroactively to a rival ethnic or religious community within the nation.Moreover, both currents are creatures fattened by algorithm. Modi’s “thousand years of slavery” trope has a genealogy running through the founding texts of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the Hindu nationalist organisation that is the ideological parent of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). But it took WhatsApp forwards, decades later, to turn what was a formerly fringe grievance into a prime time talking point. China’s 1644 view also traces distantly to Sun Yat-sen’s own anti-Manchu revolutionary rhetoric, but its present incarnation is pure Bilibili: livestreamers denouncing Qing “misrule” from a self-styled Han-nationalist perspective, and the online sport of recasting Dream of the Red Chamber as a coded lament for the fallen Ming.But the symmetry only plays out so far. In fact, the same historical tendency has produced almost opposite political responses in the two nations.How Mughals serve the BJP’s nationalist projectIn India, the argument that the Mughals were foreign serves the current government’s nationalist project. If Mughal rule can be detached from the story of India, Hindu civilisation can be presented as the country’s authentic, continuous identity, with Islam as a foreign element to be cast off rather than as an integral weave of the Indian tapestry.But in China, the authorities are moving in the opposite direction. If the Manchus are successfully reframed as foreign occupiers, the consequences for Beijing are politically awkward. The Qing, after all, was the dynasty that conquered Xinjiang, Tibet and Inner Mongolia and folded Taiwan into the empire. It is, in other words, the historical ancestor of the People’s Republic’s present borders. Taken to its logical conclusion, denying the Qing’s Chineseness is to weaken the territorial lineage on which the modern Chinese state rests.This is the fundamental contradiction at the heart of the comparison. For the BJP, history is instrumentalised to sharpen the separation between Hindu and non-Hindu. For the Chinese Communist Party, history is instrumentalized to prevent ethnic distinctions from becoming politically divisive. India’s Hindutva-based nationalism gains force by distinguishing an “authentic” national self from an internal interloper. Beijing’s nationalism depends on insisting that all the nation’s ethnic groups – Han and Manchu, Tibetan and Uyghur, Mongol, Hui and so on – belong to one continuous Chinese historical story; the story that suits the CCP’s current political ends best.So, where the BJP is busy revising history textbooks, the Communist Party has used the state apparatus to stamp the revisionist 1644 view out: censoring accounts, shelving a 106-volume official Qing History project reportedly because Party vetters judged it too influenced by “New Qing History” – a school of Western scholarship that frames the Qing as a Manchu-run Inner Asian empire rather than a fully “Sinicised” Chinese dynasty. The Party’s own flagship journal, Qiushi, has denounced the narrative as a variant of “historical nihilism,” a harsh charge in the Party’s ideological vocabulary, reserved for history that undermines its own legitimacy.Beijing’s rejection of 1644 revisionism can appear as a pro-minority move, protecting Manchus from being vilified in the manner that Muslims in India have begun to be. But the authorities’ relationship with China’s 55 recognised minorities is complex. A Law on Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress went into effect this July. Framed as an effort to forge a “shared” national identity among the Han majority and minority groups, it obliges every layer of government, and even nominally civic bodies such as the All-China Women’s Federation, to actively promote “ethnic unity.”Mandarin-language instruction is now mandated from kindergarten through the end of secondary school, formalising nationwide what had already become fact in peripheral provinces like Xinjiang, Tibet and Inner Mongolia, where minority languages have steadily lost ground as the primary medium of teaching. Other provisions prohibit restrictions, on religious or cultural grounds, on intermarriage between Han and minority citizens. Moreover, religious institutions are directed to bring all practice into line with “Sinicised,” Party-sanctioned norms.Beijing says the law is about harmony, not eradication; better integrating the country’s frontiers into the mainstream. Critics read it differently: not as a celebration of difference but as pressure on minorities to fold into a single, state-defined identity that is Han in all but name.In India on the other hand, the erasure of what Hindutva has identified as the Muslim other is an ongoing process that is visible in curriculum, cartography and the courts. Since 2023, NCERT, the body that sets school curricula nationwide, has stripped the Mughal Empire and the Delhi Sultanate from Class 12 history textbooks and the same expulsion is now working its way down through primary school: a revised Class 7 textbook released in 2025 removed all reference to either period, replacing seven centuries of medieval history with chapters on ancient Indian dynasties.China’s nationalism operates by homogenising, India’s by exclusionCities and streets have shared in the fate of the textbooks: Aurangabad, named after the Mughal emperor, Aurangzeb, is now Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar; Mughal-era Allahabad has been Prayagraj since 2018. Alongside the renaming, several legal campaigns to physically reclaim religiously disputed sites are also ongoing. Hindu litigants have petitioned courts across the country, from the Gyanvapi mosque in Varanasi to the Shahi Jama Masjid in Sambhal, arguing these were temples before they were mosques. The wave of suits has been serious enough for the Supreme Court to have frozen all similar pending cases while it decides whether the very law meant to prevent such disputes, the 1991 Places of Worship Act, holds up as constitutional.Despite the divergent government response to popular revisionism, the phenomena themselves point to a common set of underlying challenges. Young people in both India and China are frustrated by a lack of employment opportunities, inequality, and elite privilege. It is possible to interpret China’s “mourning the Ming” current as a misplaced reckoning for heightened competition in a slowing economy. In India, majoritarian assertion often masks similar anxieties, with Muslims periodically scapegoated as competitors for jobs and resources. In both cases, history and identity become a proxy vocabulary for present-day resentment.Both governments have stoked strong nationalist instincts in their attempts to manage their own diversity, although the specificities have taken almost opposite forms. One neutralises difference by absorbing it; the other makes difference the rallying cry. But both, in the end, are nationalisms of control. China’s operates by homogenising, India’s by exclusion. Both instrumentalise history; and history, as ever, has little say in how it’s used.Journalist and writer Pallavi Aiyar brings the Indian perspective to understanding China. With ‘Writing on the Great Wall’, she places her eye on China’s economy, its culture, its government and its people. Aiyar has spent more than two decades studying China, having lived there from 2002 to 2009, and again from August 2025.