www.lesswrong.com/posts/m4vLvzEMAqw5swPYN/china-derangement-syndrome-1

The sentence makes two absolute claims (“literally never” and “nor have they ever”). One well-documented counterexample is enough to falsify each.

1) China did attack a non-bordering country.
A Cambridge University Press chapter on the Ming-Kotte War in Southeast Asia (1410–11) states that Admiral Zheng He and his troops "invaded Kotte, conquered its capital, took its king and his family hostage" in Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka is not a country bordering China, so this directly contradicts the claim that China has never attacked a non-bordering country.

A Columbia University teaching resource on Zheng He likewise says that on the Sri Lanka voyage, "When fighting broke out there between his forces and those of a small kingdom, Zheng put down the fighting, captured the king and brought him back to China".

2) China did try to undermine foreign governments by covert/manipulative means.
The U.S. State Department’s historical FRUS series reproduces a 1973 CIA executive summary titled "Peking's Support of Insurgencies in Southeast Asia." It states that China "continues to sponsor and support insurgencies against certain governments in Southeast Asia" and that in Burma and Thailand "such covert assistance has significantly expanded." Supporting armed insurgencies against foreign governments is exactly the sort of covert attempt to destabilize or overthrow foreign regimes that the post says China has never done.

Because the post uses absolute wording, these documented exceptions are enough to make the claim factually incorrect.

The post compares China’s aid effort to France and the United States, but the France/U.S. numbers given are far above the standard OECD figures.

OECD’s 2024 development-co-operation profiles report that:

• France provided USD 15.4 billion in ODA in 2024, representing 0.48% of GNI.
• The United States provided USD 63.3 billion in ODA in 2024, representing 0.22% of GNI.

Those official OECD ratios are nowhere near 0.8% for France or 1.2% for America. The post uses GDP while OECD reports the standard aid metric as GNI, but GDP and GNI are close enough that switching denominators cannot explain a gap this large: the cited France and U.S. percentages are still clear overstatements relative to the official OECD data.

So, even if the China figure came from a different source, the comparison figures for France and America in this sentence are factually wrong as stated.