Mao Zedong's quote in "One Billion Customers"

James McGregor, a journalist-turned-businessman, parlayed his limited experience in China into a book on doing business in China, One Billion Customers, a best seller in 2005 as reported in the Wall Street Journal. Being more a journalist than an executive, he cannot, somehow, leave sensationalism at home, but indulges in exaggeration and misrepresentation. In one passage, McGregor quotes a saying, said to be from the Qing Dynasty, that was favored by Mao Zedong. McGregor, not known to have a command in Chinese, "translates" it as "Make the past serve the present, make foreign things serve China."
To my knowledge, this saying, well known in China, came into being during the May 4th movement, byHu Shih (who later served as China's ambassador to USA) and his friends. I probably would translate it as "Apply the past to benefit the present; apply western [methodology] to benefit China." The past in this quotation refers to history; what is wrong with learning from history, particularly from one that is as long and as rich as China's? The western in this quotation refers to western methodology in science, which China lacked -- not things, which China, then and now, had plenty. Perhaps McGregor had in mind things like opium and gunboats, which did serve China, albeit in a negative way, to humiliate China, not to benefit her.