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[China has never been able to project it’s powers outside it’s boarders.

When have they successfully been able invade another country? They couldn’t even successfully invade puny Vietnam, after Vietnam had been at war for over ten years.

China has been invaded many times, but they’ve never been able to invade anywhere else.

Mongolia was a backwater’s backwater, and they had one of the largest empire’s in history. China had a glorious civilization, and they were lucky when they stopped outsiders from taking over.]

China used to be a small village on the banks of the Yellow River. Its borders kept expanding to the point it is now bigger than the US.

China did not proceed further into Vietnam because Russian divisions stood ready to attack Northeastern China in support of its Vietnamese ally.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Vietnamese_War
[The reason cited for the attack was to support China’s ally, the Khmer Rouge of Cambodia, in addition to the mistreatment of Vietnam’s ethnic Chinese minority and the Vietnamese occupation of the Spratly Islands which were claimed by China. To prevent Soviet intervention on Vietnam’s behalf, Deng warned Moscow the next day that China was prepared for a full-scale war against the Soviet Union; in preparation for this conflict, China put all of its troops along the Sino-Soviet border on an emergency war alert, set up a new military command in Xinjiang, and even evacuated an estimated 300,000 civilians from the Sino-Soviet border.[62] In addition, the bulk of China’s active forces (as many as one-and-a-half million troops) were stationed along China’s border with the Soviet Union.[63]

The Soviet Union, although it did not take direct military action, provided intelligence and equipment support for Vietnam.[80] A large airlift was established by the Soviet Union to move Vietnamese troops from Cambodia to Northern Vietnam. Moscow also provided a total of 400 tanks and armored personnel carriers (APCs), 500 mortar artillery and air defense artillery, 50 BM-21 rocket launchers, 400 portable surface-to-air missiles, 800 anti-tank missiles and 20 jet fighters. About 5,000 to 8,000 Soviet military advisers were present in Vietnam in 1979 to train Vietnamese soldiers.

During the Sino-Vietnamese War, the Soviet Union deployed troops at the Sino-Soviet border and Mongolian-Chinese border as an act of showing support to Vietnam, as well as tying up Chinese troops. However, the Soviets refused to take any direct action to defend their ally.[81]

The Soviet Pacific Fleet also deployed 15 ships to the Vietnamese coast to relay Chinese battlefield communications to Vietnamese forces.[82]]

Re the Mongols - it took them 40+ years to conquer Song China.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongol_conquest_of_the_Song_dynasty

Mongol suzerainty over China lasted only a century. The truly humiliating thing about the end of Mongol rule is that it was terminated by a literal panhandler. This alms seeker went on to become the first Ming ruler.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hongwu_Emperor#Early_life

Note that thousands of miles away, at the literal end of their supply lines, small Mongol armies went through their far larger European counterparts like crap through a goose. It’s testament to the combat power of Chinese armies, fed by the copious resources of a major empire, that they withstood for decades the concentrated efforts of large Mongol armies that dwarfed the small detachments dispatched a continent away. Only the power struggle that followed the death of the Mongol khan of khans, and the atomistic tendencies of Mongol nobles and low-born war captains each seeking to carve out personal fiefs independent of central control prevented Europe from being overrun.