Paper tiger
"Paper tiger" is a literal English translation of the Chinese phrase zhǐlǎohǔ (). The term refers to something or someone that claims or appears to be powerful or threatening, but is actually ineffectual and unable to withstand challenge. The expression became well known internationally as a slogan used by Mao Zedong, Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party and paramount leader of China, against his political opponents, particularly the U.S. government. Origin. "Zhilaohu" is an ancient phrase. Robert Morrison, the British missionary and lexicographer, translated the phrase as "a paper tiger" in "Vocabulary of the Canton Dialect" in 1828. John  Francis Davis translated the Chinese phrase as "paper tiger" in a book on Chinese history published in 1836. In a meeting with Henry Kissinger in 1973, Mao Zedong claimed in a humorous aside to have coined the English phrase, which provoked laughter all around. Use. Mao Zedong first introduced his idea of paper tigers to Americans in an August 1946 interview with American journalist Anna Louise Strong: In a 1956 interview with Strong, Mao used the phrase "paper tiger" to describe American imperialism again: In 1957, Mao reminisced about the original interview with Strong: In this view, "paper tigers" are  superficially powerful but are prone to overextension that leads to sudden collapse. When Mao criticized Soviet appeasement of the United States during the Sino-Soviet split, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev reportedly said, "the paper tiger has nuclear teeth". In "The Resistance to Theory" (1982), Paul de Man used the phrase to reflect upon the threat of literary theory to traditional literary scholarship in American academia. He said, "If a cat is called a tiger it can easily be dismissed as a paper tiger; the question remains however why one was so scared of the cat in the first place". The  phrase was used in a 2006 speech by then-Senator and now President Joe Biden describing the government of North Korea after a series of missile launches, defying the warnings of the international community while still incapable of doing direct harm to the United States.