Obviously it still waged wars and dissolved into bloody rebellions and schisms multiple times, but it's often said that the humanist outlook of the dominant threads of Chinese thought tended to disincentivise war. Can we say that the Chinese worldview was genuinely more peaceable than its counterparts elsewhere? If so, how and why did it develop differently?
This doesn't cover all of your bases, but around this time last year I wrote this answer discussing David Kang's rather problematic (read: completely nonsensical) 'Confucian Peace Thesis', which should be a useful starting point.