In an echo of the Cold War, mistranslations are testing already strained nerves in Washington and Beijing.

Would the Cold War have unfolded differently if Nikita Khrushchev had chosen a different interpreter? It is a decades-old thought experiment, born of the phrase translated as “we will bury you”, but it is chiming with today’s strategic rivalry between China and the US. Whether the statement, attributed to the then-leader of the Soviet Union in 1956, should instead have been interpreted as the less aggressive “we will outlive you”, the incident sheds light on a recurrent headache in modern…

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