Is war with China on the horizon?

[Anomalocaris]

Can you think of any?

The Sino-Indian war in the 60's and the Sino-Vietnam War in the 70's.  In both cases China attacked and met with only limited success.

Actually, the cause of sino-Indian war is very complicated, and by no mean is it clear cut that the Chinese were the aggressors.  The ultimate origin lies with the British, who drew a line on the map around an area that was traditionally Tibetian and called it part of British Indian, despite the fact that the British was not then or would ever excert any degree of effective control over that area during the entire Raj.   When Indian gained independence India  tries to occupy the by force, claiming whatever the British considered to be British India de jure, must now be Indian India de facto. But Tibet in fact had never conceded that area. China, who claimed Tibet, objected to Indian claim to the area and threw the Indians out by force.  They were in fact totally successful militarily, and completely and humiliating defeated the Indian forces, in so far as the Indian forces which the limited scope of the war had involved.   The war ended with China holding all the territory under immediate dispute, and then declaring a unilateral ceasefire.   Indian army never formally accepted the loss or the ceasefire, but so complete was their military collapse in the area of dispute that they never challenged the ceasefire.

The sino-Vietnam war was clearly a Chinese military invasion.  But whether it was culpable aggression, or at least the sort of aggression the west has the high grounds to condemn, is also unclear. For one thing, it was done with the blessing and encouragement of the United States as a retaliation against the Soviet Union, which had gained complete ascendancy over the United States in indochina in the aftermath of Vietnam war.    Since the end of Vietnam war Vietnam had turned from a satellite reliant on both China and the USSR into a dedicated satellite of the USSR, and openly hostile to China.    China did it because China was paranoid about Soviet encirclement of China.  China saw soviet invasion of Afghanistan and ascendency of soviet influence over Vietnam as part of a coherent Soviet strategy to surround and strangle China.  So China sought to destabilize the pro-Soviet government in Hanoi with an military attack, which China believed Vietnam could not withstand.  This war was a diseaster for China.  The Chinese army was clearly incompetent and had unseemly amounts of difficulties in overcoming Vietnamese resistance.   The Chinese army had no significant combat experience since the sino-Indian war 18 years before.   Experienced and trained officers have been purged during the cultural revolution.   So the Chinese military in 1979 was in much the same sorry shape the soviet military had been in after stalin's purges in the 1930s.   So the sino-Vietnamese war played out in much the same way as early parts of the winter war between the USSR and Finland in 1939.   The difference is in this case the rest of the world was not already occupied by other wars, so China feared Soviet intervention to protect its own satellite if the Sino-Vietnamese war dragged on.  So they abruptly called off the war and withdrew their troops when it became clear no results can be expected before earliest possible soviet intervention.