Also, Chinese are not homogenous. Ignoring the 20th century Han social construct, there have always been distinct ethnic and cultural differences among differing "Chinese" ethnic groups like Cantonese, Teochew, Hokkien, Hakka, Guangzhong, etc that were erased during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution.
The Great Wall helped, it wasn't the easiest thing to move around.
Hell, at one point in the late 18th and early 19th century, the village my family is from would have technically been Qing AND Sikh AND Dogra. Borders are artificial constructs that have historically been more fantasy than reality (at least until the late 19th to mid 20th century)
Also, if you want to go the route that you are arguing, then there's a reason why Mongolia, Tibet, East Turkestan, etc fought for differing levels of sovereignity in post-Xinhai China, or that ethnic Manchus made a faustian pact with the Japanese occupation to create Manchuko. Ironically, Mao and Zhou Enlai were much more open to minorities compared to post-1980s PRC politicans.
But then again, why am I arguing with a sock puppet account based on your comment history. Either you are a very hypernationalistic commentator, or an astroturfer at worst. @Dang, thoughts about the paradox of tolerance?
From my viewpoint China never expanded not because they were chill people, they could not even repel foreign invaders, let alone expand an empire.
Totally agree we should work together on this planet, but with a dictator like Xi in power that wont happen.
Careful with that kind of rhetorics. The world may start asking the same question regarding the 15% of world's population who act like they are the enlightened masters of the world questioning whether they should "tolerate" something on the other side of the globe.
Even now there isn't much tolerance towards American or French governments, who actually do evil shit far from their national borders.
> Totally agree we should work together on this planet, but with a dictator like Xi in power that wont happen.
Meh, how about instead each of us minds our OWN business? There is no way one can be actually responsible about things one is not accountable for.
Afghanistan is a perfect illustration of that - not just recent evacuation while leaving a shit ton of modern weapons, but all the way back to the days when the US had been nurturing mujahideen to create problems for the Soviet Union, which gave the rise of what we now know as islamic fundamentalist extremism (Taliban, Al-Qaeda, ISIS and such)
You should probably brush up on your asian history - there was incredible amount of conquest wars in what became modern China with casualties rivaled only by ww1/2
This is a case of "Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother's eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?"
We can all criticize Xinjiang, but not to justify cultural superiority, if anything it works the other way.
I guess you can try to argue some kind of blood purity, but I suspect you'll find yourself in bad company rather quickly on that one...
It would be erroneous to say that later events retroactively made Genghis Khan Chinese.
Defensive, not offensive!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Territorial_changes_of_the_Peo...
In particular, the largest listed conflict: 1962, China won the military victory of Sino-Indian War but withdrew to the pre-war boundaries.
Does that mean that the China's intended colonization of Taiwan (in China's constitution), of which its territory is approximately 0.4% the size of China's current territory, would not be something serious?
I'd appreciate a bit of clarity on exactly what you're arguing here.
Dislike of America's recent history of conquest turns thousands of years of warfare on what is now Chinese territory into thousands of years of living on the same land without any invasions.
Dislike of American individualism turns Europeans into... I'm actually not sure whether you associate any specific qualities with not being ardent individualists.
Anyways, I'm quite annoyed by this, so consider yourself officially taken down.
Of course generalizing like this about groups is a cloudy lens at best but it's the premise of OP and may predict voted policy of respective countries.
That said, it's been a number of years since I lived in Switzerland and I see things have changed measurably regarding official EU policy on Chinese trade, https://wikipedia.org/wiki/China%E2%80%93European_Union_rela...
Some research on the subject: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10670564.2019.15...
Five surveys of Chinese citizens, netizens, and elites help illuminate the attitudes that the Chinese government grapples with in managing international security policy. The results suggest that Chinese attitudes are more hawkish than dovish and that younger Chinese, while perhaps not more nationalist in identity, may be more hawkish in their foreign policy beliefs than older generations.