Chinese commentators have been talking a lot lately about poverty in the United States, claiming China’s superiority by appropriating an expression evocative of video game culture.
The expression “kill line” is used in games to mark the point at which the condition of opposing players has deteriorated so much that they can be killed with a single shot. Now it has become a recurring metaphor in Communist Party propaganda.
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“Fatal line” has been used repeatedly on social media and comment sites, as well as in state-linked news outlets. It gained traction in China to portray the horror of American poverty — a fatal threshold beyond which recovery to a better life becomes impossible.
The expression is used as a metaphor to encompass homelessness, debt, addiction and economic insecurity. In its official usage, the “fatal line” hangs over Americans’ heads, but it is something the Chinese need not fear.
The representation of the United States as a place where economic difficulties are deep and widespread has been a recurring feature of official Chinese communication for years. But the use of the expression and image of the “fatal line” is new.
The strength lies in the simplicity of what she describes: an abrupt threshold at which misery begins and a happy life is irreversibly lost. The narrative seeks to offer emotional relief to the Chinese people while at the same time trying to deflect criticism of their leaders.
The worse things seem on the other side of the Pacific, the propaganda logic goes, the more tolerable the present difficulties become.
It’s no coincidence that there’s a flood of these messages right now. China’s economic growth is half of what it once was. Unemployment among young people is high. Once-familiar paths to security—steady jobs, rising real estate values, steady upward mobility—have become less predictable. For many families, the margin for error seems narrower than before.
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In an essay published online in late December, legal blogger Li Yuchen argued that the appeal of the “fatal line” idea lay in its desirability. It allowed Chinese people to condemn a distant system while avoiding uncomfortable questions about their own lives, he wrote.
The term “functions less as an analytical tool than as an emotional interpreter,” he wrote. His essay was removed by censors, joining a long list of content deleted for questioning official economic narratives.
The fact is that social inequality is a problem in both China and the United States. And the American economy undoubtedly leaves many people in weak positions. The causes are complex.
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Still, in China poverty is experienced and perceived differently. In most Chinese cities, street begging and visible homelessness are tightly controlled, making them much less present in everyday life.
Many urban residents come into contact with these scenes only through foreign reports, relayed by Chinese state media, about the United States and elsewhere.
Economic insecurity remains widespread in China. About 600 million people, or approximately 40% of the population, earn around US$1,700 per year. Rural pensions often amount to just $20 or $30 a month, and a serious illness can throw families into financial crisis.
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This fear of running out of money is one of the reasons China has some of the highest domestic savings rates in the world. But these pressures are portrayed as part of a culture of resilience and responsibility that leaves families prepared to overcome life’s unpredictable events.
For older Chinese, the use of American poverty in the service of domestic politics is familiar. During the Cultural Revolution, a famous slogan proclaimed that “happy Chinese cared deeply about the American people living in misery,” even as most Chinese themselves lived in poverty.
When I was growing up in China in the early 1980s, my family subscribed to China Children’s News, which published a weekly column with a simple slogan: “Socialism is good; capitalism is bad.”
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She described elderly people in American cities scavenging for food and homeless people freezing to death. These stories were not made up, but they lacked context and were presented as the dominant experiences of American society.
Much of Chinese society was still closed to the world, and reliable information was scarce.
That many people accepted such narratives is not surprising. What is striking is that similar portraits continue to resonate today, when access to information is relatively much greater, despite state control.
The formula is simple: magnify foreign suffering to divert attention from domestic problems. This approach is taking shape today around the “fatal line” metaphor.
The expression is believed to have been popularized for the first time in this new context on the video platform Bilibili, in early November, by a user known as Squid King.
In a five-hour video, he stitched together what he claimed were first-hand accounts of poverty from his time in the United States. His video used scenes of children going door-to-door on a cold Halloween night asking for food, delivery drivers going hungry because of ridiculous wages, and injured workers dismissed from hospitals because they couldn’t pay.
The scenes were presented not as isolated cases, but as evidence of a system: above the “fatal line”, life goes on; below it, society stops treating people as human.
The narrative spread beyond the Squid King video, and many people online repeated its accounts. Essays on the nationalist news website Guancha and China’s largest social media platform, WeChat, described the “fatal line” as the “real working logic” of American capitalism.
Others cited examples of Western journalism that, in their view, presented the contrasts between the United States and China. A Financial Times article published on December 24 about the wealth disparity in Connecticut — prosperous Greenwich and struggling Bridgeport — was republished in Chinese media.
Even a modest financial shock, such as a missed salary, loss of health benefits or an unexpected expense, can trigger a rapid downward spiral.
Another widely publicized example drew on “Hillbilly Elegy,” the 2016 memoir by Vice President J.D. Vance. People online highlighted her account of selling plasma while struggling with student debt.
If even a future national leader had to drain himself to stay afloat, asked Chinese commentators, what chance does an ordinary American have?
By the end of December, the “fatal line” framework had gained official momentum. Beijing Daily and Southern Daily, both state-owned outlets, have released several “hot topics” on the Weibo platform, which typically help attract wider attention.
Guancha published more than a dozen comments in less than two weeks applying the metaphor to poverty, health and working conditions in the United States.
The site later included the “fatal line” in its look back at the year’s top stories, linking it to criticism of President Donald Trump’s first year back in office.
In early January, Qiushi, the Chinese Communist Party’s main theoretical magazine, published a commentary addressing the “fatal line” as a structural feature of US capitalism. A term borrowed from gaming culture had entered sanctioned political language.
In many of the comments, reports of Americans experiencing abrupt financial crises are followed by comparisons with China. Universal basic healthcare, minimum subsistence guarantees and poverty eradication campaigns are cited as evidence that China does not allow anyone to fall into sudden hardship.
“China’s system will not allow a person to be ‘killed’ by a single misfortune,” states a commentary from a provincial propaganda department.
Many readers expressed shock at American poverty and gratitude for the Chinese system. “At least we have a safety net,” said one commenter.
Not everyone accepted the narrative. Some commentators have even applied “fatal line” language to domestic policies, including local actions in northern Hebei province that have drastically raised winter fuel costs for rural households.
“An issue doesn’t gain traction simply because people are stupid,” wrote someone on WeChat. “Often, it spreads because facing reality is more difficult.”
The title of the article: “The American fatal line is not about America”
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