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.
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.