What are the possibilities of the 1987 Sino-Indian skirmish erupting into a full blown war? Who would win such a war, and would it go nuclear?
I doubt it would escalate to full-scale war; it would probably be more of a repeat of 1962. However, the PLA was at it's weakest point in the late 80s: its equipment was almost all obsolete copies of 1950s Soviet stuff, its officer corps was still suffering from the purges of the Cultural Revolution and the Late Mao era (IMHO this is a big reason why the PLA did so poorly in Vietnam'79), and the Indians had access to much more modern equipment. Things might have gotten a little better by 1987, but the PLA didn't take modernization seriously until the early 90s when two pivotal events happened: first, they saw how easily U.S. forces rolled over Saddam Hussein's army, much of it equipped with Chinese weapons, and second, they had to back down during the Taiwan Straits Crisis. A disappointing performance against the Indians might
persuade them to start modernizing their military earlier.