No need to poison bread baskets you might own after everything goes down when you can just annihilate a few cities.
Dead wrong.
The logistics impact of ensuring starvation is orders of magnitude greater than the loss of few cities, especially when you are talking about China.
Remember, China has cities sitting empty in the way that the United States has strip malls sitting empty.
India also doesn’t seem to have any desire to occupy China. Only knock the crap out of them so they stop invading.
Which stops them invading longer?