The Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh once said of the Chinese and the French: "You fools! Don't you realize what it means if the Chinese remain? Don't you remember your history? The last time the Chinese came, they stayed a thousand years. The French are foreigners. They are weak. Colonialism is dying. The white man is finished in Asia. But if the Chinese stay now, they will never go. As for me, I prefer to sniff French s**t for five years than to eat Chinese s**t for the rest of my life."
[As quoted in Vietnam: A History (1983) by Stanley Karnow, p. 153; also in A Phoenix Reborn: Travels in New Vietnam (2008) by Andrew Forbes]