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China is quite aggressive and territorially self-aggrandising in its immediate backyard, but restrained beyond. Even occasional border skirmishes with India are basically fought with sticks and stones. Outside of the military build up triggered by the US during MAGA 1.0, China is not interested in projecting power globally. And why would they? The legitimacy of its political class is not bound up in maintaining global hegemony.

You have to inhabit a different plane of existence if you think those aspects of China’s foreign policy warrant a comparison to the full-spectrum vandalism of the US and its satellites which has left hundreds of thousands of corpses and ruined countries in its wake

Also see: What Does China Want?

Our findings indicate that China is a status quo power concerned with regime stability and is more inwardly focused than externally oriented. China’s aims are unambiguous, enduring, and limited: It cares about its borders, sovereignty, and foreign economic relations. China’s main concerns are almost all regional and related to parts of China that the rest of the region has agreed are Chinese—Hong Kong, Taiwan, Tibet, and Xinjiang. Our argument has three main implications. First, China does not pose the type of military threat that the conventional wisdom claims it does. Thus, a hostile U.S. military posture in the Pacific is unwise and may unnecessarily create tensions. Second, the two countries could cooperate on several overlooked issue areas. Third, the conventional view of China plays down the economic and diplomatic arenas that a war-fighting approach is unsuited to address.