Is China a Paragon of Peace?

From NewsMax.com (link) :

China's "Prime Minister" Wen Jiabao spoke at a press conference on March 14, and on March 16 UPI reported his speech under the headline "Chinese PM Downplays China Threat."

China threat? But from the UPI report or from any other report of the Western mainstream media, it is not obvious that China is a threat, still less why it is a threat.

To understand that China is a threat, nay, a mortal danger to the West, it is necessary to understand the macrosociology of dictatorship, but few Western reporters or radio/television hosts and guests are able to understand anything except "news." Had China invaded Guatemala and then Mexico, as Hitler invaded in 1939 "the rump of Czechoslovakia" and then Poland, all Western reporters, as well as TV hosts and guests, could talk the news all around the clock.

But actually, China's "Prime Minister" Wen Jiabao made the following statement to prove that China is a paragon of peace: "We have not sent a single soldier abroad in the world; we have not taken a single inch of foreign land."

I think the comparison here with Hitler and Czechoslovakia is important. If you'll remember, Hitler claimed that he was taking land that was rightly German land, since so many Germans lived there and they needed to watch over their German brothers. The Chinese make similar claims to lands such as Taiwan, Tibet, parts of India, some Japanese islands, etc. They claim that all of this is Chinese land, since at one time it was controlled by China. So it's considered an internal affair, not acts of outward aggression, like the wars the United States has been involved in.

I find two problems with his logic here. First, the United States has not taken foreign land, as Mr. Jiabao is implying. In Afghanistan and Iraq, great pains have been taken to turn the land over to the people in those lands. If the United States truly wanted to be an imperialistic power, as so many people (especially in our own press) are wont to imply, Germany, Japan, South Korea, Grenada, Panama, Kuwait, Iraq, and Afghanistan would all be under our control. The fact that they're not testifies to the restraint that the United States has been able to demonstrate as a hegemonic power.

Secondly, China has not been so peaceful with their neighbors as they would like us to think. They attacked the Soviet Union under Mao, and also attacked Vietnam in 1979 under Deng Xiaoping. And, of course, they have over 700 missiles aimed at Taiwan, and are continually threatening to take over that island. Of course, I suppose all of these would be considered "internal affairs"...