They want to provoke China without actually going to war because the costs and consequences of actually starting to shoot is quite unknown and could be extremely devastasting to them. So there's actually 2 parts of the question: you can refuse to do what they want by either deescalation/restraint or by escalating even further and making it clear that they cannot control the pace of the conflict.
And it really doesn't matter what the rest of the world thinks, as Rwanda also had a casus belli that they ignored, nobody actually cared about Yugoslavia and the facts are always malleable - see Gulf of Tonkin Incident.
