Is China Expansionist?
Is China Expansionist?
I've kept hearing the allegation that China plans to take over the world, but this doesn't seem to be the case.
China had never undertaken an EXPANSIONIST invasion since 1949. Tibet and Taiwan used to be part of China during the Qing Dynasty, Vietnam was a defensive invasion because the Vietnamese backstabbed the Chinese after they helped drive out the Americans, and Korea was a military aid.
The constant conflicts with other nations in the South China Sea are due to unresolved border disputes. Taiwan makes pretty much the same claims in the South China Sea, but no one is going to accuse Taiwan of expansionism.
Western thinking holds that a country's territorial interests will expand as its power expands (the Thucydides Trap), but China's territorial ambitions have remained pretty much static for nearly eighty years, despite their power expanding by orders of magnitude. Furthermore, China's claims over the South China Sea islands, Tibet, and Taiwan weren't even invented by the Chinese Communist Party; they all date back centuries, over a thousand years in the case of the South China Sea islands, which were part of China during the Tang Dynasty.
Historically, China had been more isolationist than expansionist, with expansions such as the Tang Dynasty's expansions being few and far between. The idea that the Chinese Communist Party would react aggressively to prevent collapse was based on WESTERN empires, whose survival depended on constant expansion. But the Qin Dynasty collapsed precisely because it overstretched, while the succeeding Han Dynasty survived for about four centuries precisely because they stayed mostly static.
Here's a quick summary:
https://direct.mit.edu/isec/article/50/1/46/132729/What-Does-China-Want