In the latter half of 2025, a phrase began circulating widely on Chinese social media: “The Kill Line” (杀线). It is not a slogan invented by policymakers or academics, nor a meme meant purely for ridicule. It is a sharp, unsettling, and revealing metaphor used by ordinary Chinese commentators to describe how American society appears from the outside. The Kill Line names an invisible threshold in the United States: a point at which a single shock, medical, financial, or legal, can push an otherwise productive middle-class citizen into irreversible collapse.
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The Kill Line exposes how deeply American culture has internalized the idea that survival must be earned continuously, without interruption. It reveals how quickly empathy collapses once someone falls out of productivity. It shows how social trust erodes when people know that one misstep can erase decades of effort.
Ooohh look at the pot calling the kettle black in this little propaganda piece
Yeah, the US has problems, BAD problems, and yeah, in the US it’s way too easy to fall off the wagon and yeah, once off it can be hard or impossible to get back up. All this by design, yeah.
Can we now do China? Step 1: don’t be Uyghur or we’ll kick you off that wagon faster than you can say “American healthcare sucks”. Step 2: don’t dare to criticize, not if your life and your family’s life is of any importance to you. Step 3: …
I could go on for a bit, but you get the picture.
At least in the US they still sort of can criticize and protest…
An interesting and poignant article. The PRC absolutely has a shitload of issues, but a lack of social safety net is not one of them.
Which, I think, goes a pretty long way towards explaining why most Chinese citizens don’t agitate too much against the ideologically repressive tendencies of the government - there is a social contract, and it does work, and the government fully understands what its contributions to that equation are, as well as what those contributions yield in terms of the sentiment of the citizenry.
What safety net? When I visited Shenzhen for work, I saw factory workers in terrible living conditions, and almost no PPE in the factory. Workers were spaced about 3 feet apart on an assembly line, with one worker using compressed air to blow dust and molding flash off a product, wearing eye protection but not hearing protection, and the adjacent working having neither. Another worker flipped over LED shop light fixtures and turned them on. They had sunglasses to protect from the brightness, but the adjacent workers didn’t.
These products are made from Chinese blood. They are made at the expense of permanently damaging the workers’ bodies, and no government agency is protecting them.
I’m talking about the fact that the PRC (and many other communist/formerly communist countries, including Vietnam and much of Eastern Europe) seem to view their populations more as a collective core resource that needs to be managed and in some areas maintained and specifically cared for with intentional and specific policy, instead of the hyper capitalist (read: US, and to a somewhat lesser extent some countries in Central and Western Europe, SK, and Japan) approach of trying to profit off of literally everything. The most basic and extreme example I can give here in the US is healthcare.
And yes - I’m not trying to detract from the flaws of the PRC here - there are many and a lot of them are, in my opinion, very serious (e.g. the whole social credit thing, the Stalinist-feeling purges they go through every once in a while, their insanely bellicose and hardline “wolf warrior” foreign policy tactics they’ve leaned into in recent decades (though the US isn’t one to talk nowadays), censorship, ideological restrictions, etc), and some are pretty heinous (see: their treatment of the Uighur population, as well as Tibet).
What I am saying is that the PRC absolutely views their population as a collectivized resource to be carefully managed, controlled, and nurtured, and that they understand that making the government a key support structure in the lives of their populace overall increases approval of their government. Which is kind of the whole point of the article that started this discussion. No, it’s not perfect, and yes, there is definitely some exploitation, as you described, but on balance, the PRC simply doesn’t try to min/max the exploitation of its citizens nearly as much as the US does.
Put another way: the PRC ensures the primacy of their government over any and all corporate entities and oligarchs within the country… and in that sense, given how the US has effectively undergone corporate and oligarchic capture, I can’t honestly say that I think our system is better.
And just as a side note: I do want to point out that I am largely not a fan of how incredibly controlling the PRC tends to be about ideological and cultural matters, so when I specifically complement their system on something, I do really mean it.
Through that lens, the PRC (paradoxically, to some) gives WAY more of a shit about its populace - in a collective sense - than the US does.
It’s something you can also feel in Eastern Europe. The state doesn’t give a shit about you personally – the institutions are often the antithesis of user-friendly. But on the macro level the concern for society does seem to be there.
A large portion of US citizens don’t care about anybody beyond themselves or their tribe. It’s the entire reason the country is where it is at the moment. The most individualistic country in the world doesn’t give a shit about its citizens is just exactly what one would expect from their way of life.
While I obviously wish people could see that it’s all bullshit, we are basically getting brainwashed to compete with each other the moment we are born here. It’s ideals that are subjected on us. I realize it’s possible for people to see through it eventually cos I have but with education the way it is here, a lot of people just unfortunately aren’t smart enough and are just full on in the cult of American capitalism or they are benefitting and happy they’re getting theirs. It’s a fucking mess.
Spot on. A measure of individualism is great, but taking it to the extremes that US culture has is clearly toxic. There’s essentially zero communal egalitarian spirit in most scenarios these days.
This is Chinese propaganda. Techniques used in the article and comments include:
- Moral equivalence / false moral equivalence
- Deflection through comparative framing
- Counter-accusation
- Strategic relativization
- Normative inversion
https://rsf.org/en/country/china China ranks 178/180 on freedom of press.
“The Tiananmen Square massacre refers to the violent suppression of pro-democracy protests in Beijing, China, that occurred from June 3 to June 4, 1989. The Chinese government deployed troops to clear the square, resulting in the deaths of hundreds to thousands of unarmed protesters.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_China
Chinese state actors are extremely active on the fediverse. They know they can’t cut off every head of a hydra, so the next next best thing is to flood it with disinformation .
A think-tank estimate puts China’s nationwide internet censorship spending at at least US $13.6 billion per year as of 2020.
An oft-cited historical figure (from 2013 Chinese sources) suggested ~2 million people were involved in censorship and information control efforts at that time.
Beyond the national apparatus, provincial and local governments operate their own monitoring setups, meaning there’s a decentralized mass of censorship functionaries nationwide.
Millions of Chinese are dedicated to destroying truth. No society can flourish in darkness. Poo bear will fail, although, in the short term they can propagandized the world with disinformation with successes in different areas. Humanity is truth. Without truth, there can be no humanity.
The best propaganda is the truth. This isn’t that. It’s a weird mix of cutting commentary on America and glossy “nothing to see here” denialism about China.
Chinese users are often brutally honest about corruption and inequality in their own country.
Lol. Not a lot of brutal honesty in a surveilance state with institutional censorship and a current practice, let alone long history of persecuting and disappearing of dissidents.
They even have an international network of “police stations” so they can intimidate expats in democratic countries.
Look on the bright side. A giant shit will eventually turn to compost, then soil which is the garden bed a rose will eventually spring from.
Triggered american is triggered
Please don’t waste my time with botslop like this, I know China has massive problems and frankly your inability to have any conversation beyond that level is embarassing.
Nothing about my post or my words have defended China here, so your emphasis that yes China has many very serious problems is entirely unnecessary. We all know. If this article said “look at how perfect China is!” I wouldn’t have posted it, but the article clearly lays out issues with China and identifies that this construction of “The Kill Line” is itself partially a form of propaganda (at least that is obvious to me?).
What feels unbalanced is the need of people like you to redirect any criticism of the US towards how bad China is especially whenever the two countries are brought up, even if it doesn’t make sense and is tangential to the conversation.
No “we all” dont. You havent been paying attwntion. I invite you to view any .ml instance thread for proof.
What feels unbalanced is the need of people like you to redirect any criticism of the US towards how bad China is especially whenever the two countries are brought up, even if it doesn’t make sense and is tangential to the conversation.
You may just be ignorant and never read my post history, but I am among the first to criticize the US and viciously, but deservingly mock them at every opportunity. No redirection required.
I also harshly criticize my own government in Canada, because I can and they deserve it.
What I can’t stand is the Chinese desire to gloss over their rather extreme problems and point fingers. It’s dishonest.
If you don’t want your time wasted with opinions that aren’t your own, you should leave public forums.
If you don’t want your time wasted with opinions that aren’t your own, you should leave public forums.
It isn’t the fact that I disagree with you that makes me feel like this interaction is a waste of time, it is the need in your comment to dumb the conversation down, turn it into an Us Vs. Them conversation when the point is about the extreme fragilities in US society independent of how much better or not better China is.
In this entire conversation you have completely directed your words away from empathizing with people in the US who may be on or past “The Kill Line” and wasted our time by talking over the conversation yelling about “ChiNa iS woRse ThoUgH”.
Do you understand how that comes off to someone who feels like they are on that kill line in the US? You sound like an asshole just trying to deflect the conversation to the least relevant area.
You brought China into this, not me. If you wanted to talk about the US killing line you should have done just that.
Yeah baby! That’s where I am! 🤙🏄♂️
Same, this article hit me like a lightning bolt it so lucidly described my life experience here in the US.
The material harm is obviously massive, but there is also the pyschological disorientation and hollowing out of your relationships and connections to the social fabric around as you travel further past the line, it is like entering into an awful dream where everything familiar and friendly around you warps into abstract, cold shapes as you watch your life crumble and honestly I don’t think any other phrase captures all of that wholistically better than “The Kill Line”.
Great video thanks for linking!
That dude shouts way too much for my taste. He’s saying stuff and sourcing it, but he’s just USAian levels of loud. Were he in Europe, everybody would know he’s a yank for shouting like that.
Ok? I’m more interested in what he’s saying than how he says it.
I’d be interested too if he presented the info without yelling at me. His style is just too stressful for me, personally.
