STBD,
For starters, I have never been remotely interested in talking about pre-revolutionary Imperial China. The issue is whether China is (as many are averring) an expansionist power today.
My original post read:
"But at the same time, let's not confuse China today with Stalinist Russia. China is not, generally speaking, expansionist (though it does obviously want to reintegrate what it sees as the renegade province of Taiwan, and it does want control of the Spratleys - like most other countries in the area). But it is not a major threat to its immediate neighbours."
My next post: "But Communist China is not an expansionist power. Never has been. Sorry!"
I did say that: "China has never been expansionist, except in terms of its ambitions in what it sees as legitimate parts of China, such as Tibet, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau.", but only after making a point about different forms of 'communism' after which the reasonable reader should have realised that the reference was to Communist China, and not to the Ming dynasty!
I don't support China's view on Tibet, Taiwan or the Spratleys - I'm all for self determination in all cases. But this is not about expansionism, it's about maintaining what China sees as its territorial integrity and identity. All I'm saying is that supposedly 'expansionist' China's ambitions have been remarkably limited - to what can be seen (and which are seen by China) as being long-standing and historic parts of the nation.
To try to explain my objection to using the term expansionism can perhaps benefeit by reference to the war in the Balkans. This wasn't about Serb expansionism - it was about Serb resistance to the devolution of parts of the nation - though in this case, the entity of Yugoslavia was extremely short-lived and an artificial creation, making it a poor example to cite alongside China.
Westy-coasty
There is the world of difference between disputes over places like the Spratleys (or the Falklands, or South Georgia, or the Antarctic) where mineral rights are the motivating factor, and where 'expansion' is not. You make a very interesting and thought-provoking point about Japan's motives in WWII, but (I believe) are over-simplifying the issue. The whole culture in pre-War Japan encouraged expansionist adventurism, and had previously resulted in the Wars with Russia and China.
Taiwan doesn't consider itself as independent from China - it regards itself as a temporarily separated (legitimate) part. Mainland China thinks the exact opposite. Whatever else this is (and I must stress that I'm entirely behind democratic, pro-Western Taiwan) it isn't about expansion, it's about re-unification!
Hitler was expansionist once he went beyond the Sudetenland into non-German Czechoslovakia - but to call the recovery of the Rhineland, the Saar or even the Anschluss with Germany 'expansionism' is perhaps to stretch a point. For me to make that point illustrates how far we've descended into semantics. The fundamental point is that trying to paint China Today as an international ogre, a great danger to its neighbours and to world peace, indistinguishable from Hitler's Germany or Stalin's Russia is fundamentally mistaken.
It's a tyrannical place, with a poor record on human rights, but it's reforming slowly and the threat it poses (especially to the USA) is economic. Please have the honesty to admit it, and let's be less hypocritical and admit that what happened to the EP-3E (NOT to the crew) was pretty much a 'fair cop'. This sort of recce mission is quite deliberately provocative and we must expect occasional over-reaction and anger.
If you want to get upset about expansionism and the illegal occupation of territory take a look at the land allocated to Israel under the 1947 Partition (the best half of what was then Palestine) and look at what they've since grabbed and illegally occupied by force of arms. Huge swathes of Palestine, Jordan and Egypt. And what the Eretz Israel lot claim as being rightfully theirs is even more frightening.
Getting back to the point of the thread - I'm sure that repairing and recovering the P-3 would be prohibitively expensive, so perhaps tensions could be defused by presenting the airframe to the museum (taking back the undamaged engines?) in exchange for a redundant J-8 airframe for the Smithsonian?