When Russian-language speakers want to say that somebody is bluffing, they often use the idiom “China’s final warnings.”
China failed to intimidate US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi into canceling her trip to Taiwan, and its claims that Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) aircraft would “accompany” her plane on its approach to the nation, and probably even shoot it down and launch a war, did not materialize.
Beijing’s bluff not only discredited China, it also frustrated Chinese nationalists known as “little pinks.” Pandering to their whims, the Chinese government sought to replicate the Third Taiwan Strait Crisis of 1995 and