India’s response? It should take a leaf out of the Chinese book and play long term. It has to build its economic power as diplomatic and military power are built on that base. China leads India in virtually every respect— GDP, the fight against poverty, literacy, life expectancy, higher education and research— with perhaps one exception, software exports. Against this, if there is a single weakness which China is rapidly developing, it is hubris.
India must lie low in the short and medium term, build its strength (only a confident nation can strike deals) and hope that conditions in both countries will be ripe for striking the deal which Deng Xiaoping had offered in 1988 but which India had declined— accepting the status quo, the line of actual control, as the international border between the two countries.