China Says It Doesn’t Want Conflict. Its Actions at Sea Suggest Otherwise

China takes pride in being a peaceful country. “We never started a conflict, occupied an inch of foreign land or waged a proxy war,” its defense minister, Li Shangfu, said at the Shangri-La Dialogue, a regional security summit in Singapore on Sunday. But on that same day, when Li said that war with the U.S. poses an “unbearable disaster” for the world, the U.S. military released a video showing China making moves in the Taiwan Strait that would only seem to escalate the already rising tensions between the two superpowers.