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Falsehood
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Excerpts from:
Fact Check: Has China Initiated Zero Conflicts Since Founding of PRC?
By Tom Norton On 11/4/22 at 4:11 PM EDT
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A tweet sent by internet entrepreneur Kim Dotcom on November 2, 2022, reposted a fact sheet that claimed that China “initiated 0 conflict for “70+ years since the founding of the PRC, not even a proxy war.”
The sheet compared this to the U.S. which it claimed “waged 201 wars, proxy wars included,” adding: “Only 16 years of its 240+ years of history saw no warfare.”
The tweet, which has had more than 30,000 engagements, included the message “China is evil?”
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Kim Dotcom, who founded the defunct file-hosting site Megaupload, has made other dubious claims about conflicts recently via his Twitter account.
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The provenance of the China claim appears to trace back to Xi Jinping. In November 2021, Xi and U.S. President Joe Biden held a virtual one-on-one summit.
During the summit, Chinese state broadcaster China Global Television Network reported that “Xi said the Chinese people have always loved and valued peace, adding that aggression or hegemony is not in the blood of the Chinese nation.”
Citing the Chinese president, it added: “Since the founding of the People’s Republic, China has never started a single war or conflict, and has never taken one inch of land from other countries.”
To assess this claim, Newsweek spoke to a number of experts on Chinese history and culture, all of whom said the claim was untrue.
Michael Szonyi, the Frank Wen-hsiung Wu Professor of Chinese History at Harvard University, called the statement “nonsense” and cited the Sino-Indian War of 1962 and the Sino-Vietnamese War of 1979.
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Szonyi, a Fellow of the Public Intellectuals Program of the National Committee on US-China relations, said these were the most straightforward examples.
“If one does not accept PRC claims to sovereignty over Tibet, Xinjiang, and Taiwan, then the number grows much larger,” he added. “China certainly comes out ahead compared to the United States, but that is not what this claim says.”
Read the rest here:
https://www.newsweek.com/fact-check-has-china-initiated-zero-conflicts-since-founding-prc-1757106
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