Despite Beijing’s militant rhetoric, its responses to developments in Southeast Asia in the late 1950s and early 1960s suggested a preference for cautious diplomacy over revolutionary violence. This was true of China’s responses to what it regarded as adverse developments in the domestic security arrangements and/or diplomacy of Laos, Cambodia, Thailand and Burma, where its principal goal was to dissuade countries from pursuing policies hostile to it, particularly in association with the United States. The approach to India, however, was different. As a major regional power that was a leader of the non-alignment movement and one of the most prominent leaders of the Third World, it challenged the Chinese confrontationist approach to the two superpowers. Nehru’s close association with the arch-‘revisionist’ Tito only made matters worse from Mao’s point of view. The Tibetan uprising in March 1959 led to the Dalai Lama’s flight to India and disputes about the border led to small-scale fighting later that year. Khrushchev did not side publicly with China as was his duty towards a fellow socialist state. This paved the way for a more intensive border war in 1962 when, in response to India’s ‘forward policy’ in what was then called the North Eastern Frontier Agency, the Chinese, claiming a desire to ‘teach India a lesson’, inflicted a humiliating defeat upon the Indian army. This contrasted with relatively generous border agreements that China reached with Burma and Nepal. Indeed, China found it easier to establish enduring relationships with smaller avowedly neutralist countries such as Burma and Cambodia. The effect of the war was to damage India’s international prestige, to seal a close relationship between India and the Soviet Union, and to deepen Sino-Pakistani ties.