WASHINGTON (AP) \u2014 Nearly 80 years after Mao Zedong called the United States a \u201cpaper tiger\u201d to boost morale at home, U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin are exchanging barbs who is the paper tiger of today.<\/p>\n
In a Sept. 23 post on Truth Social, Trump mocked Russia\u2019s military powers and called the country \u201ca paper tiger,\u201d prompting the Kremlin to push back. Trump backed off, but on Tuesday he brought back the dismissive rhetoric when addressing a roomful of generals and admirals.<\/a> \u201cYou\u2019re four years fighting a war that should have taken a week,\u201d Trump said of Russia\u2019s war with Ukraine. \u201cAre you a paper tiger?\u201d<\/p>\n On Thursday, Putin retorted<\/a>, \u201cWe are fighting against the entire bloc of NATO, and we keep moving, keep advancing and feel confident, and we are a paper tiger; what NATO itself is?\u201d <\/p>\n He added: \u201cA paper tiger? Go and deal with this paper tiger then.\u201d<\/p>\n Those familiar with modern Chinese history have found it amusing, odd and not without irony that an American president should be using a classic Chinese propaganda slogan \u2014 words that came from the heart of a communist government that is the polar opposite of what the Trump administration frames as the best way to run a country. <\/p>\n \u201cAs a Chinese historian I had to laugh at the irony when President Trump appropriated one of Chairman Mao\u2019s favorite expressions in calling Russia a \u2018paper tiger,\u2019\u201d said John Delury, a senior fellow at Asia Society. <\/p>\n \u201cMao famously said this about the United States, at a time when the U.S. had a growing nuclear arsenal and China was not yet a nuclear power. … How times have changed. Now the leaders of the United States and Russia are calling one another \u2018paper tigers\u2019 as Chinese leader Xi Jinping sits back looking like the adult in the room.\u201d<\/p>\n How paper tiger became a propaganda term in China <\/p>\n The phrase \u2014 \u201czhilaohu\u201d in China\u2019s dominant dialect \u2014 is well-rooted in the culture of the Chinese Communist Party. Perry Link, a well-known American scholar on modern Chinese language and culture, recalled that Lao She, a famous Chinese writer, referred to U.S. troops as the \u201cpaper tiger\u201d during the Korean War years.<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s a Cold War echo across this whole story,\u201d said Rana Mitter, a British historian specializing in modern Chinese history.<\/p>\n Accounts by Chinese state media and essays by party theorists say the phrase entered into the party vocabulary when Mao, the founding revolutionary, told the American journalist Anna Louise Strong in a 1946 interview that the atom bomb by the United States was a \u201cpaper tiger,\u201d which the \u201cU.S. reactionaries use to scare people.\u201d <\/p>\n Mao then used the Chinese phrase \u201czhilaohu,\u201d which means paper tiger literally. But his interpreter translated it into \u201cscarecrow,\u201d according to state media reports, before an American doctor who was present suggested \u201cpaper tiger,\u201d which Mao approved. The phrase largely refers to something that is seemingly powerful but actually fragile.<\/p>\n Delury said at the time that Moscow, which took the nuclear threat seriously, was aghast that Mao \u201ccasually\u201d dismissed the threat and was annoyed that \u201cMao would brazenly use \u2018paper tiger\u2019 rhetoric at a time when if nuclear war broke out, China would rely on Russian involvement.\u201d<\/p>\n The term became \u2018a sharp thought weapon\u2019 for China<\/p>\n That didn\u2019t happen. Mao seized power in 1949, and the phrase \u201czhilaohu\u201d became a propaganda staple in communist China, closely associated with western imperialists, particularly the United States. Mao famously said that \u201call reactionaries are paper tigers.\u201d In canonizing the leader\u2019s wisdom, party theorists have called the slogan Mao\u2019s \u201cstrategic thought\u201d and \u201ca sharp thought weapon.\u201d<\/p>\n The rhetoric subsided when U.S.-China ties warmed in the 1970s, but it resurfaced in recent years as bilateral relations chilled.<\/p>\n In April, in the heat of a tariff war between the two countries<\/a>, a Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson posted on X a Mao quotation from 1964: \u201cThe U.S. intimidates certain countries, stopping them from doing business with us. But America is just a paper tiger. Don\u2019t believe its bluff. One poke, and it\u2019ll burst.\u201d<\/p>\n Before Trump borrowed Beijing\u2019s propaganda slogan to mock Russia, the phrase had already seeped into the public discourse in the United States. In a February editorial, Eugene Robinson, a Washington Post columnist, criticized Trump\u2019s foreign policy and compared it to bullying. \u201cTrump\u2019s foreign policy is that of a paper tiger, not a real one,\u201d wrote the columnist, now retired<\/a>.<\/p>\n