Some days it really does seem the cold war has merely shifted, rather than ended. Beijing officials are whistling in the wind if they think they can easily alter the thinking of former American cold warriors still stalking the diplomatic stage.
Take last Friday, when the US consul general in Hong Kong, Stephen Young, a former State Department Kremlinologist, spoke to AmCham and peppered his remarks with Soviet-era references, apparently unfazed by Beijing's sniping about the mindset it faces in Washington.
Asked about coming leadership changes in Beijing, Young swiftly referred to his years in Moscow as he spoke of the importance of 'generational change' when Mikhail Gorbachev emerged in the mid-1980s.
The cold war surfaced again as he spoke of the need to foster enduring military ties with the PLA to ease, among other things, the risk of accidents at sea.
'As a veteran of US-Soviet affairs ... we had dialogues with the Soviets on things like incidents at sea not because it was all flowers and light but because we had some real problems there,' he said. 'That's the goal of my government in urging China not only to continue this re-engagement but not allow it to become hostage to extraneous matters as it has in the past.'
Hailing post-handover freedoms and the 'remarkable success' of the Hong Kong experiment, he used Ronald Reagan's favourite 'trust but verify' line to explain continued US interest.