China’s ‘Peaceful Rise’? A Timeline Written in Blood and Bullying

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From Tibet to Galwan, from Tiananmen to lawfare at the UN, China’s rise has been anything but peaceful—and its neighbours know it best.

By TRH World Desk

New Delhi, December 24, 2025 — The phrase “China’s peaceful rise” has long been sold to the world as strategic reassurance. But as China observer Ken Cao bluntly notes, history stubbornly refuses to cooperate with propaganda. Since the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, Beijing’s trajectory has been marked less by peace and more by coercion—internal repression, external aggression, and relentless territorial expansion.

Within a year of its birth, the PRC invaded Tibet and plunged into the Korean War. Taiwan was attacked repeatedly in the 1950s. The Great Leap Forward starved tens of millions, followed by the Cultural Revolution that destroyed China’s intellectual spine. Abroad, China fought India in 1962, clashed with the Soviet Union in 1969, seized the Paracels in 1974, and invaded Vietnam in 1979. In 1989, the world watched tanks roll into Tiananmen Square.

The pattern did not end with Deng-era reforms. In the 21st century, China seized Scarborough Shoal from the Philippines, clashed violently with India at Galwan Valley, and has since maintained constant military pressure on Taiwan, Japan, and Southeast Asia. Border disputes stretch from Ladakh to Bhutan, from Nepal to the South China Sea—almost every neighbour has felt the squeeze.

As Japanese commentator Ed Naito highlights, Beijing’s aggression is not just military but legal. Since 2009, China has weaponised international law—“lawfare”—by claiming its continental shelf extends to the Okinawa Trough, directly challenging Japan’s EEZ. It then unilaterally installed over 30 oil and gas platforms along the median line, draining resources from contested waters.

This is not peaceful rise. It is expansion by force, famine, fear—and finesse. Observers warn that the world must stop mistaking China’s patience for restraint, and its rhetoric for reality.