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.
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.
HAHAHAH someone actually mistook me for a 沪爷 i am actually insulted
you are preaching to the choir my man, i live in a shithole mid tier city where col mostly exceeds median income and the government spent its money on land financing and vanity projects instead of getting its shit together in a real way. i bought houses in ~2017 (cant remember) and 2020 and got laid off in 2020 and again in 2023 so again, i am literally your textbook scenario.
i am in the group of people i was shitting on earlier that you are apparently so concerned about: the stupid fuckers who jumped on the fomo train post 2017 because that is when they really started pumping the market. in reality, the housing market had already crashed in most lower tier cities across the country post i wanna say 2015ish and the 17-19 was imo a giant dead cat bounce before the dump (obviously t1 does not apply here). home buyers i have interacted with generally fall into several different categories across this timeline. the first group, unsuccessful prole transplants, had either bowed out by 2017 or were just renting and planning to move back home; these guys remain basically unaffected because they dont have houses. the second group are the successful prole transplants; these guys basically hunkered down and got house(s) before 2015. they are less affected than later groups because they bought early and in less developed areas and were not categorically wiped out: they just stopped winning as hard. the third group is me, the stupid fomo fuckheads who fucked themselves. this group is probably the most eclectic and encompasses basically everyone who fell victim to the fomo or was some kind of aspirational striver. most people here come from an urban background (simply because most rural guys don't make it this far), local or transplant, and they fucked up specifically because they were never able to figure out if the house was supposed to be a speculative or material asset. no doubt the government didn't help by tying educational districts to housing to pump the numbers but these guys decided not to play it safe and ultimately people here wrecked themselves because they had just enough rope to hang themselves with and so made the plunge. even then, they are not completely fucked (unfortunately) unless they leveraged the original house that they started with. the last group are the pure speculators. no explanation needed. as for the local government, are you actually suggesting they are going to shut down the subway? my city has been screaming bloody murder over the budget since covid and yet the fucking ornamental flowers are somehow STILL getting replaced every two weeks and the streets are STILL getting washed on rainy days and this has been the case in pretty much all the places i have been to in the past two years. are you saying that the environmental and sanitation departments have more pull than the transit guys? as an aside and as some commentary on the purely speculative group, the people near me who have taken the biggest haircuts these past years have been the bosses and the bankers/finance/insurance people, with a lot of bosses letting go of property they've accumulated to service debts for their (lol) real estate affiliated companies and the banking dudes losing up to 90% (!) of their total compensation. if this is a bad economy i want it to fucking get worse tbh.
fundamentally, the difference is that you can fuck around all you want in china but you will basically never find out so long as you don't gamble ALL the property you already own, and even if you do, you might be underwater for the rest of your life but you are not going to be homeless dying in a ditch somewhere. this is what the 社会主义巨婴 netizens could not comprehend about american capitalism but are slowly coming to terms with. all the 润人电子宠物 left not because they were forced onto the execution threshold, but because they were unserious people who were unable to accept the fact that they had fucked up and had to face (less than life threatening) consequences for their stupidity.
to further illustrate my point because i am just that pissed about this: i have a friend who is actually another textbook, perhaps even more textbook case than me: parents own property in neighboring city, bought first property before shit started getting expensive, bought second property because her kid had shit grades and needed to go to school EVEN THOUGH the house was riiiiight at the edge of her ability to service and her kid had awful grades and wasn't interested in learning anyway. the house i think has dropped like 50%? of the value she paid and i'm fairly sure she is sleeping with her boss (at the expense of time with her kid) to service the second mortgage. do you know why i have zero empathy for this lady? because if i pulled this shit in america i would be dead. in america i didn't even have any debt obligations and i was already living in my car on and off. that house she bought is objectively a luxury purchase (that is to say, coming from superstructural stimuli as opposed to material) and i think a lot of people on this forum would agree with this and that her current predicament is unnecessary and entirely self imposed. you can bitch all you want about how im depriving the poor migrant workers of their chance at class mobility but if you were to offer me a henanese pigsty vs some sketchass parking lot near skid row with gunshots going off every 15 to 45 minutes, i'd take the pigsty in a fucking heartbeat.
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.