Meaning
A person, state, or institution that looks menacing or powerful but proves weak or ineffectual when tested, a threat that is all show. Usually contemptuous of the thing so labelled, or else intended to reassure the speaker's own side. English keeps the idiom's literal image intact: a tiger-shaped figure made only of paper. Dismissive of its target but admiring of the speaker's nerve; strongly associated with political and geopolitical commentary. Regional use: General English (calqued from Chinese).
Origin
A calque of Chinese zhilaohu, 'paper' plus 'tiger', for something that appears fierce but is harmless. The Chinese idiom is old: the 14th-century novel Water Margin has a character cry out in fright at seeing one, and the Qing statesman Li Hongzhang lamented that his armies and navy were 'merely paper tigers'. English writers glossed it early; the missionary lexicographer Robert Morrison recorded 'a paper tiger' in his 1828 Vocabulary of the Canton Dialect, and Word Histories identifies sinologist John Francis Davis's 1836 explanation that the Chinese call 'a blustering, harmless fellow' a paper tiger as the earliest known English appearance, followed by newspaper uses in 1840 and 1845. Global currency came in August 1946, when Mao Zedong told the American journalist Anna Louise Strong in Yan'an that the atom bomb was 'a paper tiger which the U.S. reactionaries use to scare people' and that 'all reactionaries are paper tigers'; he even overruled his interpreter's rendering of 'scarecrow' in favour of the literal tiger image, and in 1973 joked to Henry Kissinger that he had coined the English phrase himself.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- paper tigers (plural)
- paper-tiger (hyphenated)
- zhilaohu (romanised Chinese, in scholarship)
Usage Examples
- Inspectors concluded the cartel was a paper tiger, loud in its threats but unable to enforce them.
- Calling the regulator a paper tiger is risky when it can still freeze your licence.
- The alliance looked formidable on paper, but the campaign revealed it as a paper tiger.