An editorial in Chinese state-affiliated media claimed last month that China would use “all measures necessary” to ensure control over Taiwan.

In spite of these tensions, and the looming threat of war, one viral tweet alleged that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) had never, in fact, initiated any conflict.

The Claim

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?”

The Facts

Kim Dotcom, who founded the defunct file-hosting site Megaupload, has made other dubious claims about conflicts recently via his Twitter account.

In October, Dotcom suggested that Ukraine’s army chief General Valerii Zaluzhnyi had been pictured wearing a swastika bracelet, an allegation that was based on a misleading photo.

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.

The Sino-Indian War launched with a surprise Chinese attack on October 20, 1962, with the People’s Liberation Army driving with overwhelming force through the eastern and western sections of the Himalayas, deep into northeastern India. Thirty-two days later, Beijing announced a ceasefire.

The Sino-Vietnamese war, a similarly brief border conflict, was initiated by China, although it lasted only 29 days.

Szonyi, a Fellow of the Public Intellectuals Program of the National Committee on US-China relations, said these were the most straightforward examples: “China certainly comes out ahead compared to the United States, but that is not what this claim says.”

Professor Robert Bickers of the University of Bristol, who specializes in modern Chinese history, also labeled the claim tweeted by Dotcom “nonsense” and noted other engagements such as a Chinese invasion of Tibet in 1950, attacks on Taiwanese forces in 1954 and 1958, and attacks on Soviet border troops in 1969.

Julia Lovell, a professor of modern China at Birkbeck College, University of London, and author of Maoism: A Global History, also highlighted how “Mao-era China set up training courses for international revolutionaries and guerrillas (from a wide range of places: Southern Rhodesia, Peru, Columbia, Burma, India) in China.”

“The future leader of the Shining Path, Abimael Guzman, attributed his political/military awakening to such a visit. Josiah Tongogara, the future military leader of ZANU in Zimbabwe, studied military science in Nanjing, China,” she said.

Lovell said the chapter in her book on Maoism in South Asia “describes how the Beijing government applauded the Naxalite insurgency in north India in the late 1960s.”

She added: “China under Mao also offered material aid to a number of insurgencies, most notably the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.”

China’s recent military posturing has caught the attention of the world. In a series of videos posted in July, tanks were seen moving through the streets of Rizhao City in Shandong province.

First thought to be related to banking protests in Henan, it was later linked to military exercises amid escalating tensions between China and Taiwan.

Newsweek has contacted Kim Dotcom for comment.

The Ruling

False.

As attested by a number of experts and published authors on modern Chinese history, the claim in Kim Dotcom’s tweet that modern China has initiated zero conflicts is false.

The People’s Republic of China has started a number of conflicts, trained revolutionaries, and contributed to other conflicts in Asia. It appears that the “no conflicts” claim was made by Xi Jinping in 2021.

FACT CHECK BY NEWSWEEK