Every major People's Liberation Army deployment, border conflict, and military intervention beyond Chinese soil since the founding of the People's Republic. Sorted by outcome. Beijing calls all of them defensive.
In December 2025, Xi Jinping brought Emmanuel Macron to a two-thousand-three-hundred-year-old irrigation system in Sichuan province. He was not offering a lesson in hydraulic engineering.
Michele Rovatti · May 2026
The Dujiangyan irrigation system was built around 256 BC by Li Bing, governor of Shu under the Qin dynasty. It is the oldest functioning irrigation infrastructure in the world — continuously operational for over two thousand three hundred years. It works by cutting a channel through a mountain to divide the Min River into an inner channel for irrigation and an outer channel for flood control. No dam. Not blockage but division. Not opposition but redirection. The river's own force is the instrument of its management. It is a UNESCO World Heritage site. It still irrigates the Chengdu Plain today.