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.
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.