Don't Know, Man
For much of history, Chinese civilisation has thrived within the 400-millimetre annual rainfall isohyet, the climatic threshold separating fertile agricultural heartlands from arid steppes.
*source: Weijian Shan, writing in South China Morning Post
The title of this opinion piece is "To avert war, the West must shatter the mirror by which it views China"
and it spends 5 minutes of deep-dive historical lecturing to make the point: "The concept of the Thucydides Trap, predicting conflict between China and the US, projects the West’s conquest-driven history onto Chinese civilisation"
Shan contrasts agrarian China with "sea peoples", such as the "Japanese raiders"
and quotes a 19th century white man's lightly informed opinion on the soul of the Chinese people:
As US justice Stephen Field wrote in a decision of the US Supreme Court related to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, “[Chinese immigrants’] dying wish is that their bodies may be taken to China for burial”.
Mr. Shan seems to wish for the West to see a cherry-picked historical China, not as it was during the expansionist Tang Dynasty (Han emperors, but very long ago1), the Yuan Dynasty (Sinicized Mongols), or the Qing Dynasty (Sinicized Jurchens).
There are 56 official ethnicities in modern China2.
China is no longer full of peasants, with most people earning a living from agrarian activities.
Even 200 years ago, when it actually was full of subsistence farmers, ask the people of Vietnam, Thailand, and Cambodia about Chinese domination.
Or to bring it to the present, ask present-day Filipino fishermen, students in Hong Kong, and Taiwanese semiconductor factory workers, if modern Chinese society simply wants a peaceful existence within its own borders.
單叔父, what a strange opinion piece to write. Most Chinese people your age were scratching dirt in their youth, and now use robots on the daily. That's more relevant to current geopolitics, than how frequently weapons were buried with ancestors.