"But the real disaster for China’s Third World relationships was the 1962 border war with India. This was a conflict that had been a long time coming. Although China and India had cooperated for a while after their states were reconstituted in the late 1940s, a decade later they were locked in enmity. The causes were many. China suspected, with some justification, Nehru’s government to be sympathetic to Tibetan nationalists. India feared that Chinese control of the Himalayas would put New Delhi at a dangerous strategic disadvantage. But the most basic problem was that the Chinese Communists always viewed Nehru’s Indian state simply as a colonial construct, something less than a real country. Nehru, on his side, saw Chinese-style revolution as a threat not just to his wishes for India’s development, but to the security of all of Asia. “The Indians,” Zhou Enlai had told Khrushchev in 1959, “[have] conducted large-scale anti-Chinese propaganda for forty years.” The war broke out when Indian military mountain patrols moved into disputed areas of the Himalayas in October 1962. Chinese soldiers tried to force them out, and both sides started shooting. The Indians were on the offensive first, but the PLA managed to get large reinforcements in, which pushed the Indian army back. When the fighting ended the Indians had been thoroughly routed, and the Chinese took control of the disputed region. The war was a shock to all of Asia, and not least to the members of the recently formed Non-Aligned Movement, which had India as one of its principal members. But the main effect was to further isolate China, who, largely because of its bellicose language, was seen as the aggressive party."