In Washington, senior Chinese diplomats have long loved to pepper American cultural references across their conversations with US counterparts, quoting everyone from Mark Twain to Martin Luther King. As Vice-President Xi Jinping prepares to head across the Pacific to meet US President Barack Obama in the White House on Valentine's Day, they may be tempted by the malapropisms of Yankees' baseball legend Yogi Berra.
Xi's visit, after all, does seem to be a case of 'deja vu all over again', as Berra would have it.
It is almost exactly 10 years since then vice-president Hu Jintao made the same journey. And while both countries - and their diplomacy - have shifted since, the similarities are striking.
In 2002, Hu arrived in Washington and New York something of an amiable enigma. Given the transition then from the era of Jiang Zemin, Hu's mission was one of limited expectations.
He appeared to stick to a safe script, even as, unusually, he took questions at some events. While he needed to impress, it was always going to be a trip where the avoidance of screaming blunders was more important than striking breakthroughs.
Ditto for Xi. While Hu had to negotiate the minefield of a Washington in the grip of hawkish Republican rule post September 11, Xi will face a US capital in the grip of considerable economic and political uncertainty in a turbulent election year. Many of the policy questions are the same - the trade deficit, yuan devaluation, North Korea - yet they have grown more intense since 2002.