I'm assuming you haven't forgotten the forgotten war? The Korean War in which Mao attacked the United States and South Korea and pushed us back to establish a client buffer state. Read the Sino-Soviet border conflict, a seven month campaign that began with a PLA ambush of Soviet troops. Then there was was Sino-Vietnam war, often overlooked.

It's all there, but you don't learn this at a Confucious Insitutite. You learn China was always peaceful. Not that China attacked almost every single neighbor it has from 1950 to 1970. What stopped it? Mao died and relations normalized.