Forty years after "Richard Nixon touched down to be greeted by the Chinese premier, Zhou Enlai, at the airport in what Westerners in those days still called Peking", the New York Times'
John F Burns reminisces wistfully, even eagerly, on how China's communists "taught" the Americans a lesson, with those wise old men even showing restraint in the exercise thereof.
How often since have I cherished the note of mischief that the Chinese smuggled into that solemn moment. Plain as could be, inscribed on a large posterboard at the rim of the airport apron that overlooked the cockpit of Air Force One, picked up by the television cameras relaying images of that famous handshake, were Mao Zedong’s words in Chinese, set in white on a red background in the manner of the “big character” posters of the Cultural Revolution: “Make trouble, fail; make trouble again, fail again, until their doom. 
This is the logic of all imperialists and reactionaries the world over, and they cannot go against it. This is Marxist law.”
If the board had been bigger, the inscription might have added these still blunter words from the same passage: “When we say ‘imperialism is ferocious,’ we mean that its nature will never change, that the imperialists will never lay down their butcher knives, that they will never become Buddhas, till their doom.” But the Chinese, ever economical in their dealings with foreigners, must have felt that they had made their point with sufficient clarity.
Now ain't that something? Not only did China's communists teach America's capitalists that the latter aren't better than anybody else, according to the
New York Times, those wise leaders even exercised restraint in doing so! Almos' makes you wanna forget the tens of millions o' Chinese citizens killed by Mao and his henchmen, don't it?!
