Lately I’ve seen a Chinese internet meme called “美国/北美斩杀线”, which literally reads like “U.S./North America kill line.” It sounds violent, but it’s mostly a gaming metaphor: in games, an “execute threshold” is the HP line below which you can finish someone off easily.
A popular Bilibili creator (nicknamed “Lao A” by viewers) helped push this meme into the mainstream by using it as a one-sentence model for economic fragility in the U.S./Canada:
below a certain “buffer,” a single small shock can trigger a cascade.
The “cascade” he describes is roughly:
• a minor injury / illness / accident happens
• costs and downtime hit at the same time
• missing one payment snowballs into fees, credit problems, or housing instability
• and once you’re “below the line,” climbing back out is much harder
He also talks (in a very memey, simplified way) about how modern life can be “stacked”: bills, notices, addresses, fines, deadlines, credit scoring, insurance rules—lots of small frictions that are manageable when you have savings and stability, but dangerous when you don’t.
To be clear: this is a meme framework, not an official term, and it can be exaggerated or one-sided. But I’m curious how it lands with people who live in the U.S./Canada:
TL;DR: Chinese netizens use “U.S. kill line” as a gaming metaphor for a point where one mishap can snowball into a major life downturn. A Bilibili creator popularized the framing, and I’m asking whether it resonates and what’s missing.
It’s the latest line of propaganda being pushed on the Chinese internet, I suspect, in response to the kids breaking the internet calling for a revival of Cultural Revolution just a few weeks ago, and also after a series of anti-Japan propaganda in the past months have faltered against the kids, who turned out to be too doomerish to be receptive to this kind of patriotism rhetoric.
Honestly I have no trouble with showing the reality of American capitalism, but if the government thinks that this is going to make the kids think “look it’s even worse in America” without substantive action to commit to wealth redistribution, then they have underestimated how doomerish the Chinese youth have gotten these days (at least the ones I’ve talked to). The tangping (lying down) movement has been growing momentum and the kids would rather be idle and live miserably than to be jingoistic against some foreign enemies.
this is such a garbage take lol, if this was the case why hasn't shit like 群丁 been taken down after over a year? because the cpc wants to incite anti tibetan racism? surely the cpc propaganda angle explains why 牢a's stream was banned by bilibili management a week after the original execute threshold upload.
you can conspiracize the other side too: the 芳华 incident is a redux of the 吴京 bobblehead meme, necro'd some obscure and irrelevant cultural artifact from half a decade ago that no one actually cared about and pumped the numbers with artificial engagement, resulting in extremely mid flash in a pan memes with staying power only so long as the money kept flowing.
it's funny because 牢a was actually not particularly popular before, he was affiliated with 大角鼠, 瓜哥, 红幻 and the other wh40k nationalists but didn't get much exposure because his content was mostly just telling anecdotes and urban legends he heard from working with homeless people in seattle (embellished for the audience obviously). the video that went viral and the originator of the execute threshold meme was an entirely realistic account of the american health care process for a comparatively major disease or injury. LITERALLY all he did was describe how your standard american would go from primary care to a specialist to treatment and the role health insurance played in the process and approximately how long this whole thing would take. while he did make belittling comparisons to how the entire thing was like getting hit with shadow demon's (a dota hero) shadow poison ability (which is where the execute threshold meme comes from, you're gonna get hit hard after 3 stacks regardless), compared to his other dumb stories it was actually very down to earth and dare i say realistic.
the tangping movement has actually been losing momentum because everyone just relocating to back to their hometowns or lower cost cities which are actually no longer miserable and have reasonable cost of living to salary ratios. there is a dialectical process going on here because underdeveloped interior cities are benefiting from this at the cost of the coastal ones, which has been a stated goal of the cpc for a while, but obviously there are interest groups on the coast (entrenched export oriented manufacturing) that would prefer either staying in place or moving out of the country to somewhere cheaper altogether. i would say that the youth, while unhappy about the job market, benefitted a lot from the housing market getting taken down (to give xhs the benefit of the doubt, lets just assume salary growth has been nil over the past 5 years, but housing prices dropped like 30% while durable goods also went down in the double digits. are you really going to be that mad?). it was only really the petit bourgeoisie that had investment properties that got hit hard: it's not like you're going to be losing any wealth if you only have the one house that you're already living in or if you were already renting. coincidentally, a lot of those same petit bourgeoisie got rich off of cheap exports over the past two decades and are being forced to either upvalue, relocate or die, so the doomerism that xhs is describing is mostly just a malaise of the extremely vocal would be parasites. unsubstantiated, but the actual proles have been getting assfucked ever since the infrastructure boom began in 2010 and tend to be on platforms like kuaishou and tiktok, wouldn't trust bilibili with anything considering the demographics of its management and its userbase even if they used to be social rejects. though tbf tiktok and kuaishou lean a bit too far in the other direction...
I’m going to assume you live in Shanghai and is in the top 0.5-1% bracket? (No need to dox yourself if you don’t want to though, it’s just how I remember it)
I can tell you that the top 1%, even the top 10%, are certainly out of touch with the rest of the working class in China. These are the people who haven’t really experienced the consequences of the deflationary economy, even though the Tier 1 cities have seen the most drop in consumption (guess why that is the case). I know because I am friends with some of them (academics).
Are there job opportunities in the lower tier cities? Remember the property prices plunging is affecting the local government financing much more seriously for the Tier 3/4 cities and below than the Tier 1/2 cities. Not everyone lives in Shanghai you know, which is the wealthiest city in the country.
No offense, but you are certainly out of touch with even most home-owning middle class people in China. You’re not describing how people think when they’re buying house and committing to a 20-year mortgage.
Let’s say your house price is inflating. Now if you suddenly lose your job (remember there is next to no unemployment welfare in China) and couldn’t find another in months, you can still sell your house and downgrade your living conditions, then take the price difference as your emergency funds to get through the difficulty. This was why back in 2017-2019, the middle class was spending lavishly, because everyone knew that their wealth was inflating so they could make riskier consumption and investment choices.
However, when the prices are deflating, and if you lose your job, not only are you not able to sell your house (who’s willing to take over a house that’s going to be 10% cheaper next year?), you STILL have to keep paying your mortgage after having lost your income. To put it mildly, you’re practically fucked. That’s simply the reality of many home-owning middle class who bought houses after 2017.
Guess why people are not spending and started saving these days? Because they have to squeeze out every bit of income to service their mortgage, and in the event of losing their job, they’re going to need every bit of that to survive.
Your thinking assumes that people are at no risk of losing their jobs over an entire 15-, 20- and even 30-year mortgage period.
And because the home-owning middle class has reduced consumption spending due to their property prices falling, the economy spirals into deflation as business profits are cut to razor thin margins, production downscaling and workers are getting laid off, which is why the young people cannot find jobs these days. That’s where we are right now.
So, no, it’s not just affecting the petit bourgeoisie, it’s affecting everyone! And that includes the local governments that have tied their budget to land finance. Somebody has to maintain the public transportation and public services, you know.
Also, it’s not just middle class who owns houses, many migrant workers were scammed into buying properties in the provincial towns (with the promise to access high quality education for their kids) by the local governments in order to drive up land prices. Now they’re getting screwed even harder.
Of course, if you live in a Tier 1 city and making income at the top bracket that allows you to live like a king in China, you’re not going to feel any of that.
I wont claim that I have inside information on china but no matter what platform I look at that has people going to china, they all say life there is decent. They interviewed a person who is on government welfare which takes 90% of their bills, the doctors visit is dirt cheap even for people not having insurance.
I dont think this is an accurate description of whats going on. Otherwise youtube must be in bed with the fascists (proven) and their opponents (absolute idiocy). Same as bezos' twitch and all other western platforms.
I dont doubt that there is no shit happening. Life is not a tv show but we have people starving and freezing to death on the streets in the thousands.
I have two questions regarding your old comments that you linked to:
Isn't it literally true that the CR under Mao was hijacked by elites from early on? Specifically, that CPC bureaucrats basically agitated their own right factions of the Red Guards in opposition to Mao's left factions and that's a major element of why it devolved into a sort of highly-disorganized civil war? Aside from the fact that a lot of it became about local blood feuds and turf wars even beyond what local bureaucrats helped instigate. It also seems a little like you reference there really being an elite abusing things later in your comments, but perhaps I'm misreading you paraphrasing the guy who made the video.
Please correct me if I'm misunderstanding something. Obviously, I'm not about to defend the Gang of Four, and Mao's approach throughout this period merits a great deal of criticism too.
You go on to talk about it being co-opted, but what Marxism do kids actually learn in a normal education in the PRC?
As you said yourself, the lionization of the Gang of Four and the insinuation that their reputation has been deliberately vilified by the liberal reformers is a huge taboo.
I don’t have to remind you that most of the liberal reformers were victims of the CR. Deng Xiaoping’s eldest son was pushed out of a window at Peking University and became disabled for life. Xi Jinping’s sister took her own life after constant harassment by the Red Guards. There is no way that the current leadership will allow any kind of rehabilitation of the CR.
They’re practically patriotism class. They teach you the very basics of Marxism then tell you, China is still a developing socialist country and while we strive to become a communist country one day (some lecturers will say, “communist countries with high welfare such as Norway and Sweden”, not a joke) we’re not there yet, that’s why we still can’t have high welfare like the Scandinavian countries. Write a 3000-character essay about why the party is great, those sort of essays. It’s one of those classes that nobody’s into.
If you’re very lucky, you might get a genuinely good lecturer who teaches you the real stuff, but you’re otherwise getting a lecturer who’s half-assing it (and doesn’t even understand theory themselves) and like most kids, you’ll probably ended up hating the entire class.
The bit about "patriotism class" is good to know. I was having some good conversations about the "kill line" on xhs, introduced some people to the phrase "paycheck to paycheck", but it really struck me that users didn't know the realities of living under bourgeois dictatorship to begin with. It took independent study for me to put words to that reality, but I would have expected those to be taught in school in China.
I've been listening to Blackshirts and Reds while I work, and I can't help but think about the people of the Eastern Bloc not knowing what they had until they lost it.
We have these in the US, too. Economics, Civics, History, and a lot of literature/English classes are teachers justifying Manifest Destiny, American Exceptionalism, and war crimes. I was taught literal Holocaust denial by multiple teachers.
This sounds like a universal problem of the state wanting to uphold its ideology but not having the best educators to implement it lmaooooooooo
Thank you for elaborating.