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.
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.