Whose happiness? China, India and the problem of the Western yardstick

Last week, the World Happiness Report was published by Oxford University’s Wellbeing Research Centre. Much of the reception of this dwelt on the consistently high-ranking of the Nordic countries. However, I think that Indian and Chinese reactions to such reports can help us in Europe reflect on how we think about the non-West, and specifically China and India.

A country’s score is based on responses to a single survey question which ‘asks people to rate their life on a 0-10 scale, from the worst possible life (0) to the best possible life (10)’. The resultant ranking has China and India a long way behind the UK and US (23rd and 24th respectively), unsurprising given the lower GDP per capita of both. China, at 68th, is ranked significantly higher than India, which trails at 118th; again, unsurprising, given China’s far better economic growth over several decades. However, as the graph below shows, since 2012 China has risen from 98th, while India has declined from 111th. China’s score has risen by 19% while India’s has declined by 10%. However, this trend is showing signs of reversing, with China declining and India recovering a little just recently. While it would be interesting to examine this divergence more closely, I am most interested to ask how have Chinese and Indians reacted to these results.

Official reaction to this year’s 2025 World Happiness Report in China has been limited, it would seem because China’s progress has stalled. The Chinese government sees ‘happiness’ as a measure of its governance success, so naturally does not want to publicise any failures. Certainly, in China, governance is a field in which Sino-American competition is keenly felt. Many take pride in the stability of China’s governance and the contrast with the US’s instability. The only Chinese coverage I found this year was in the China Daily which ignored China’s poorer score than before to muse entirely on the US’s lowest ever score and its growing number of ‘deaths of despair’. One eminent Chinese involved in Sino-American relations once suggested to me that really governance is the deciding factor in terms of China’s relations with the US. He remarked that, ‘if one gets governance right then no one can harm you, but if you get it wrong then no one can help you.’ Xi Jinping, China’s President, agrees that happiness and governance are closely linked. In his new year speech Xi stated: “Of all the jobs in front of us, the most important is to ensure a happy life for our people […] We must bring more smiles to our people and greater warmth to their hearts.” Given the political importance then of the happiness of the Chinese people, it is perhaps not surprising that China’s media only seems to engage the data on happiness when positive. Back in 2023, Global Times, a particularly enthusiastic pro-government newspaper, welcomed an Ipsos poll which placed China top of global happiness rankings. The paper’s explanation echoed the most banal propaganda claiming that one cause of the people’s happiness was their ‘unwavering support’ for the Chinese Communist Party, by contrast with the political discontent in the West.  The other cause of China’s success was said to be ‘traditional Chinese societal values’.

In India, the low happiness ranking has met much scepticism because it jars with the widespread confidence and pride in India’s democratic system. Great bafflement was caused by the poor performance compared with countries facing major strife such as Israel-Palestine and Ukraine. However, most ire resulted from Pakistan’s higher position, inconceivable to many given the economic instability and lack of democracy which that country’s people suffer. Democracy is an important part of Indian identity and thought to differentiate it from authoritarian rivals Pakistan and China. Comments online have also challenged the report’s methodology suggesting that some highly placed countries would have done less well if things like suicide rates or use of anti-depressants had been factored in. Others, more persuasively, assert that Indian traditions produce quite different ideas of happiness which cannot be measured by this survey.

There is common ground here where some in both China and India resort to a post-colonial emphasis on ‘tradition’. In China’s case, official enthusiasm for China’s strong performance in these happiness surveys also sees this explained as deriving from Chinese traditions. And in India, the irritable rejection of such polls is often accompanied by a strong defence of India’s distinct value system derived from its own spiritual history and practices. This type of reaction has a long history and can be seen in the language of early Asian nationalist intellectuals who countered Western colonialism’s dismissal of the ‘East’ as backward and degenerate, in contrast with the vigorous ‘West’, by making a merit of that dichotomy and recasting it as Eastern ‘spiritualism’ against Western ‘materialism’, the former deemed more moral and virtuous.

But the many critics of these happiness surveys surely have a point when they argue that Nordic, and generally Western, countries score higher because what is being measured are Nordic and Western ideas of happiness and well-being. Is it possible that the great Asian nations and cultures of China and India are placed so low down the global league table of happiness because the survey’s methodologies are incapable of reading properly these targets? The post-colonial scholar Gayatri Spivak’s concept of ‘epistemic violence’ is useful here. The phrase is often used now to mean the distortion done when one tries to understand an object of study from the non-West by using Western terms; like assessing Indian music against classical European rules. And many argue that these happiness surveys fail because China, India and others cannot be properly understood when measuring ‘happiness’ in Western terms.

The consequence is that Asian and other states are placed low in a league which is measuring Western notions of contentment, well-being and happiness. These places are then sidelined, regarded as having less to teach the world about happiness. The result is that we all miss out. Rather than obsessing over Danish ‘hygge’ culture for instance, the world might benefit more from learning about what it is that makes Indians and Chinese content. I would suggest this could be expanded to all fields. Rather than the bafflement with which the Western world greets Chinese and Indian politics and diplomacy, more effort could be made to read these in their own terms. For instance, when considering economic policy in China: what role does social stability play? And what is the history of diplomatic non-alignment that underpins India’s confounding warmth towards Russia despite the Ukraine War? So rather than imposing Western notions of happiness, we might, as one publication based in the Middle East suggested, reflect on how differently the World Happiness Report might look if, rather than ask a question based on individual fulfilment, instead the survey asked whether the respondent felt loved?