There’s a Chinese idiom that gets used pretty regularly in everyday conversation, especially when someone wants to describe a particular kind of social maneuver: hú jiǎ hǔ wēi — the fox borrowing the tiger’s power.

You’ve probably encountered the dynamic it describes before. Someone walks into a room with an aura of importance, and people naturally defer to them. But it turns out the person themselves has no real authority — they’re just riding on the reputation of someone they’re connected to, or the perception they’ve carefully cultivated. In English, you might call this “piggybacking on someone else’s reputation” or “blowing smoke.” But the Chinese have been using this particular fox-and-tiger image for over two thousand years, and the story behind it is genuinely fun.