Michael,Generally that seems to have been true, but hard to say...

Michael,
Generally that seems to have been true, but hard to say in the future. China has had a fairly traumatic time over the last 100 or so years.
Trauma and frequent violent shake-ups, as they have experienced as a population, do not necessarily tend to lead to peaceful tendencies and intentions towards their neighbours and others that they might still have some unresolved grievences against.

They are still quite unhappy with Japan over WW2 and still quite unhappy with most European powers over the Opium wars.

My guess is that they are more likely to take their revenge in their success and in driving some hard terms in negotiations in trade deals, and ther other simmering territorial disputes, rather than anything too overt.

But as I pointed out in a recent post, the massive distortion of the male/female ratio due to the one child policy and the advances in fetal sex determination, doesnt imply that a peaceful future is all that certain.

Historically, a massive overbalance of young men in the community who will have no chance of marriage, tends to lead to war-like tendency of the society in general as many of these men tend to gravitate to the military. Also, government policies must be framed to satisfy a large group of restless young men who might not feel that negotiations are the best way to go for a particular issue that might involves loss of face. Territorial issues often have this characteristic.

But who can tell. We can make some intelligent guesses and see if one of them might play out to our favour.