I have to say, I love your comment; especially your historical references. Obviously, for the sake of keeping the post under 10 pages, LOL, I have to leave out lots of details and summarize.
My main intent was to convey one Chinese perspective, or better yet, the CCP’s.
"how dare the West do to us for a century what we have done to nations around us for the twenty previous centuries?!”
I think you hit the nail on the head with this!
Human history is replete with the transfer and capture of lands belonging to other peoples. If you zoom out far enough over the past 5000 years, not one piece of land was held onto by the same people for too long.
Empires have risen and fallen, due to external or internal issues. Great Powers have absorbed smaller powers. Peoples and nations have been wiped out from famine and disease, and a neighboring power would walk right in and claim it for themselves. Even with the great migrations of tens of thousands of years ago of nomadic peoples, lands exchanged ownership on a relatively frequent basis.
It's only been since the advent of agricultural societies 8 to 10 thousand years ago, that people have stayed longer in an area to grow and harvest their crops, and to protect what they produced, which eventually led to borders, armies, and spreading further out because you know, people like to procreate and accumulate more resources.
So as China expands, and possibly takes Taiwan, it will be participating in the long and well-documented history of our species, by conquering lands, and building bigger civilizations, until the next empire comes along and takes it from them.
Everything you said in your comment, I can easily see as one perspective, just like my post. But what makes this whole thing tough, is the transitions. Transitions, most of the time, are not easy. A lot of the time they are violent. And violence sucks if you're the one going through it.