King Xuan of Chu asked his ministers whether the northern states really feared Zhao Xixu. The ministers were silent. Jiang Yi answered with a story. A tiger caught a fox. The fox said that the Lord of Heaven had made him leader of all the beasts. He told the tiger to walk behind him and watch.
The beasts ran at the sight of them. “The tiger did not know that the beasts ran because they feared him. He thought they feared the fox.” (Strategies of the Warring States) The idiom 狐假虎威, the fox borrows the tiger’s might, comes from this story.