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.
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. 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.
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.
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.