China is not ramming fishing vessels because the US once clandestinely deployed mines in the 1960’s.

So what you're saying is that China has no valid security concerns behind their actions?

I don’t think “40 years of non-violent growth” is an accurate statement at all.

Let's see why.

I can agree that contemporary Chinese imperialism doesn’t look like US imperialism and has utilized less

Well, since 1992 the US has conduct major kinetic military operations against over 14 countries, completely destroying at least 3 of them. Since 1992, China hasn't fired a shot against anyone. So, yeah, doesn't look like it at all. Less as in zero.

I think your framing of China vs. violent psychopaths is inherently flawed.

Fair. White supremacist Christian Eurocentric empire has only dominated every continent for 600 years, with most national borders across the whole world defined by genocidaires and child rapists, and military bases all over the world that are immune to local laws where young women are kidnapped, raped, and murdered by soldiers weekly and everyone knows it but no one can do anything about because of the violent psychopaths (sorry, I meant USians, who are just like everyone else). Not to mention the US criminal justice system monitoring and managing at least over 3x the number of prisoners and parolees as the next highest country in the world with some of the worst outcomes, worst recidivism rates, and economic extraction practices compared to literally anyone.

But fair, maybe my framing is uncharitable.

China may or may not have fewer of those kinds of people in power compared to other governments, but it has plenty.

Granted. Is it driving the same outcomes? No. It's not. The outcomes are substantially and consistently better and have been for decades without interruption.

It’s an inescapable fact of humanity that those people exist and have a tendency to seek power, and that power has a tendency to bring out those characteristics in people.

And it is the job of a society to develop the social technologies necessary to manage those characteristics effectively. Eurocentric society is the world-crowning pinnacle of what happens when you fail - patriarchal white supremacist ChristoFascist genocidal child raping oligarchs committing mass murder on every inhabited continent to prove how civilized they are.

There is nothing special about the people of China that make them better than the rest of humanity, the same problems of humanity manifest in China as everywhere else on the planet.

And yet, the outcomes are different. Is that because Chinese people are racially superior? No. It's because Chinese society has developed superior social technology for managing these problems.