MacArthur never crossed the Yalu River. Troops under his command -- Korean troops at that -- approached the Yalu River in the fall of 1950.

Modern Chinese history? How about "whitewashing Chinese history" period. Precisely because the Confucian ideal is indeed harmony, so much of Chinese history stands condemned by the very standards appealed to by the FM!

Ah, revisionist histories. Where would we be without them? I seem to recall Chinese armies attacking Korea at several times in the distant past (pre-20th century), not to mention Vietnam, not to mention invasions of Central Asia... Of course, my undergraduate courses in Chinese history are some years ago so my memory is somewhat rusty, but still.

Peaceful and harmonious relations? Someone give me a cut of whatever drugs the FM is taking. I need some escape from the dreary reality of law school assignments, papers, et cetera...

Yes quite so, it seems that the selective memory of China in forcing Japan to remember its wartime atrocities but forgetting many events of a more recent nature prove the statement that China has always been a peaceful neighbor as disingenuous. China in fact has attacked, tried to foment revolution or had border shooting incidents with every country bordering it in the last 60 years. Between 1950 and 1980, someone correct me if I'm wrong, but China must have been in more wars with neighbors than any other country on the planet.

But maybe since China at that point was a new country trying to struggle free from its past imperialist influences, it would argue that period of its history was a bit of teenage rebellion. Shame though, that it cost so many lives, particularly Chinese ones.

Yes China has shown aggression in its past also to neighbors, from the Xiongnu in the West to the Koreans in the East. But it is fair to say that Chinese dynasties have been more peaceable than most. It's hard to judge though, when over the last 1000 years, for about 35%-40% of it China was ruled by aggressive invaders (Mongols, Manchus). In the end though, it seems difficult to make a case for China being any more peaceable than any other country.

And that's true, American troops never crossed the Yalu, the issue was that MacArthur wanted to bomb the bridges there. He also wanted to drop up to 50 nuclear bombs on China, making the Chinese and its Foreign Minister indeed look like peace-lovin' hippies.

You must admit that China never did anything to its neighbours that it wasn't willing to do to itself twice over. Of course, in this context, The USSR was very peaceful, too, as it was rarely overtly aggressive outside its borders. If you want to be aggressive towards a neighbour, annex it first: now it's an internal problem.

The situation in Imperial times is complicated. To begin with, the very concept of a neighbor--as in neighboring people or state that is in some sense equal and deserving of respect is not exactly one that they had. There is only supposed to be one world--tianxia. There is no such thing as independent "sovereign states". The emperor is literally supposed to be the ruler over the world (though his actual power diminishes as the distance to the capital increases). And any tribe or people or locality that is not actually under the imperial order is only one more 'barbarian' tribe that awaits incorporation. Now the Confucians have always advocated that incorporation is to be a peaceful process of civilisation. The emperor and the imperial order in general, if it rules with virtue, cannot but attract those on the periphery towards peaceful and voluntary submission. This is the (quasi-) Confucian ideology anyway. In reality, emperors and their courts readily recognize the soverign power of states powerful enough to resist (as in the case of Russia). They were also not shy of 'helping' the incorporation process with a bit of military force (the 1000-year back and forth with Vietnam is the classic example). In any case, the ideology complicates any evaluation of the FM's claim because there is a sense in which the very notion of a "foreign war" is conceptually out of place within the traditional ideology--there is a sense in which it's all internal (because it's all internal, given that there is only one world political order). The ideology only began to really breakdown--even as ideology--in the 18th and 19th century when powerful Westerners began to burst on the scene. It's much harder to pretend that the British with their gunboats are just another barbarian tribe somewhere out there awaiting the civilizing influence of the Celestial Empire.

Yes, bromgrev, it is a bit of a problem when you are re-classified from 'tributary neighbor' to 'internal problem', isn't it?

Huichieh, I quite agree with everything you say. In my humble opinion, what insulted China even more than previous invaders like the Mongols or the Manchus was that the British (nor any other Europeans) were unwilling to even adopt the trappings of Chinese dynastic power, which at least acknowledged the centrality of China in the universe...