Why has Chinese civilization been on the defensive for 5,000 years, but has never had a tradition of external expansion?

There has always been a question that Chinese civilization is much more benign than other civilizations. It seems to have been in a passive state of defense. In fact, at the height of its power, it was perfectly capable of geographic discovery-style colonization and expedition.

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There were voyages, but only to find a few tributary states; there were large-scale wars, but most of them were civil wars. The result seems to be that other civilizations, such as the Christian civilization and the Islamic civilization, have a very strong desire to expand.

When you think about it, greed is always in the nature of mankind, so why is it that the Chinese civilization has never had a tradition of external expansion?

An agricultural civilization

Chinese civilization is a typical agricultural civilization, geographically presenting itself as an agrarian civilization centered on the Han culture, as well as a part of the northwestern and northeastern part of the nomadic civilization encircling the layer.

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When people from the agricultural civilization hold the power, usually their enemy is the nomadic civilization, and if we interpret the war between them as the expansion of a certain side, then this expansion is limited: the development of the agricultural civilization is obviously limited by the geographic and climatic conditions, and the 400 mm precipitation line is the demarcation line between the agricultural civilization and the nomadic civilization. The 400 mm precipitation line is the dividing line between agrarian and nomadic civilizations.

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The land beyond this precipitation line was useless to the farming civilizations, economically worthless and uninhabitable for them, so the main purpose of the wars with the nomadic civilizations was to obtain a safe environment for the fundamental development of agriculture.

When someone from a nomadic civilization comes to power, there are usually two scenarios: it takes control of most of China and integrates with the agrarian civilization, and the next manifestation is close to that of the agrarian civilization's regime mentioned above.

The other scenario is that it is not centered in the agrarian civilization area, such as the Mongols, for whom striving for a wider land was also a way of survival, and the Yuan Dynasty's attack to the Rhine-Danube, as we think of it, was a manifestation of this way of survival.

Two, navigation

Since the Song and Ming dynasties, navigation has been quite developed, especially in the Song dynasty's overseas trade, where large and massive overseas orders and shipments were breathtaking. But for this agrarian civilization regime, the cost of land development and management overseas was problematic, and centralized management of overseas territories was simply not possible with limited transportation.

The transportation and communication conditions of an era also determine the extent of expansion in that era, and for an agrarian-based civilization, especially one that has achieved a set of results in agricultural development, the extent of expansion is as far as their centralization can be guaranteed.

The ocean was no mystery at all to Song merchants, who did their bulk of their business at sea yet. It's just that the status of commerce is low after all, so things like mobilizing court forces to secure trading posts for merchants is not something our court would do.

There may also be a problem of cultural tradition, the introverted culture represented by Confucianism, and the premature maturity of civilization, all of which makes us close to that kind of naked land grabbing, as far as overseas is concerned, we do not need to use this to ensure the survival of a country.

The objective existence of a large land mass in the interior, and a civilization that has always been ahead of the curve, makes that existential danger almost nil.