All this mind numbingly petty and irrelevant Indian hair splitting really exemplifies why they cannot attain great power status - all they can do is focus on the sesame sized areas where they have not completely lost and claim them as evidence of some grand victory, all the while ignoring the watermelon sized actual concessions they gave - all achieved without the PLA having to fire a single shot in anger (officially at least).
This all kicked off due to Indian strategic miscalculations and wishful thinking in believing western and their own media lies about China being completely destroyed by Covid and just hiding the evidence.
The Indians decided to probe to see if that was the case, with the aim of pushing hard to seize as much land as they can get away with while China was weak and vulnerable if so.
China’s rapid and overwhelming response, especially surging troops from Wuhan itself, completely dispelled all possible Indian delusions, and they were all set to make a hasty withdrawal until they lost control of their own troops and that idiot colonel decided he really needed to win the Darwin Award.
What followed was an nothing sort of pure punishment for the Indian military forces deployed on the front as China forced India to stay engaged as PLA troops lived in luxury in heated and oxygen enriched barracks while Indian Jawas tried not to freeze or suffocate to death in tents while using millennia old stove tech that India is spinning as some sort of cutting edge innovation. That’s the sort of suffering PLA troops only needed to endure on rotation to forward OPs while that was basically the standard across the entire Indian front.
Indian armchair generals might be all fire and fury, but if they had their way and an actual war broke out, the PLA would have found the Indian troops facing them even more of a pushover than usual as the suffering they barely survived all winter would have not done their fighting spirits or capabilities any favours. That is on top of China’s technical and firepower dominance.
India and China should have been natural allies or at least friendly neighbours, since the natural boundary of the Himalayas means there they would have to literally go out of their way to step on each other’s toes. Yet that is precisely what successive Indian governments have done.
The only reason India and China have a boarder dispute is because of Indian arrogance in demanding to use a line some British irrelevant arbitrarily drew on a map before India had even become a state. China offered to hold talks and would have made generous concessions, but the Indians wanted to behave like they were the British empire at its prime and flat out refused to negotiate and instead tried to enforce their claim with military force, thereby breaking the most fundamental of Chinese taboos making war the only possible outcome.
In the decades since, India had plenty of time to forget its spanking and make a fresh start, but their arrogance turned to avarice, denial and downright delusion as rather than embrace meaningful reforms to try to actually compete with China, they just got more bitter and started harbouring fantasies about destroying China since even their most zealous fantasists started to accepted in their hearts of hearts that they can never hope to match China in fair competition.
That is why the are keeping the boarder dispute with China open and active despite all sense and reason. They want their claimed territories as a springboard to launch further invasions of Tibet, Xinjiang and beyond. It is sheer folly of the most ridiculous and dangerous kind.
India has been supremely lucky in that geography and strategic priorities have meant China has had little appetite to repay them the kind of hostility they have been showing to China.
However Chinese patience is not infinite, technically advancement is rapidly eroding the barriers and constraints that geography can impose on Chinese forces, and Chinese long term strategic interests are now bringing them into areas where geography no longer play such a major part.
Chinese military philosophy have always tended to go to extremes, in that China will go to unusual lengths of avoid war, but if pushed to war, it tend to respond with disproportionate force, to either teach generational lessons to the foe, or to end them forever as threats.
Do not mistake Chinese patience and restraint for forgiveness, all of India’s transgressions are being tallied up with interest also accrued.
If India does push China into open war, it might just get the nation ending war it wants, only it won’t be the nation they want that ends up erased from history. Modern India is a very recent and artificial construct with many glaring racial and regional fault lines that would be child’s play to exploit and shatter and balkanise India into a dozen or more endlessly warring states, as India have been for the vast majority of its history.
Sure, in general no one wants chaos and never ending wars on its boarders, but the same geography that holds Chinese forces back now will also limit any fallout from such from reaching China. And as annoying as having a bunch of little countries endlessly fighting and slaughtering each other on your boarder would be, it’s infinitely better than having them United in hatred of you and eternally waiting for you to show any weakness and/or suffer some unforeseeable and unpreventable natural calamity so they can invade and slaughter you to take all your possessions for themselves.
