Hmm… listen, I have made mistakes — yes, sometimes serious ones. But I never made them with bad intentions; I always made them with good intentions. … - Deng Xiaoping

China is poor and our military is backwards, I agree. But we have our traditions, you know. And for quite some time, using inadequate and miserable equipment, we have cultivated the art of defeating well-armed enemies. Our territory is extremely vast, and in this vast territory the people have learned the necessary resistance for a long war — to bend the strength of others through their weaknesses. Whoever wants to invade China should remember this truth, and I believe that the Soviets remember it well.

As we all know, in the last few centuries colonialism and imperialism unscrupulously enslaved and plundered the people of Asia, Africa and Latin America. Exploiting the cheap labour power of the local people and their rich natural resources and imposing a lopsided and single-product economy, they extorted superprofits by grabbing low-priced farm and mineral products, dumping their industrial goods, strangling national industries and carrying on an exchange of unequal values. The richness of the developed countries and the poverty of the developing countries are the result of the colonialist and imperialist policy of plunder.

Crossing the river by feeling the stones.