Google says per capita is for each person. And there are a lot more persons in both India and China. Much lower isn't going to help for long.

They're looking to catch up! They don't want to remain poor, after all.

They don't need to come anywhere near US levels of per capita emissions to stop being poor. Here are some countries that are generally considered to be reasonably wealthy, and their per capita emissions as a percent of US per capita emissions:

  63% Japan
  61% Germany
  36% UK
  30% Switzerland

India is at 12% now and China at 48%.

They are just as much looking to leapfrog and have opportunities to do so. Without massive numbers of oil and coal lobbyists, as just one example, it is far easier for them to jump straight into massive renewable energy sources and skip a lot of Western CO2 mistakes in their "bootstrapping" processes.