- China
- Confronting and Competing with China
One January morning, I was driving back from Dulles airport with a friend visiting from China. Our Uber driver, a woman in her forties, mentioned almost in passing that she had just divorced, lost her job, and moved here to start over, piecing together a living behind the wheel while she figured out what came next. As we stepped out of the car, my friend said excitedly, “That’s a real-life kill line story.”
Kill line? I had never heard the phrase until then.
On Chinese social media, “kill line” has become a new way to talk about American life. Borrowed from online games, it names the health threshold below which a character can be finished off with one hit. The story that popularized it was told in the shocked voice of a young Chinese visitor encountering American homelessness in Seattle. It quickly became a state-driven propaganda meme describing Americans as living on a cliff’s edge, one layoff or medical bill away from homelessness, debt, addiction, or death. In this narrative, American poverty becomes a horror story: America is a cruel, merciless capitalist system always about to collapse, while China presents itself as a “safe” haven whose superior system keeps people from ever reaching that line.
The irony is that the kill line tells us less about how fragile America is than about how hollow the moral imagination can be in an officially socialist, atheist society. In a system where moral teaching is reserved to the Chinese Communist Party and citizens are nudged to equate earnings with dignity, the kill line finds ready soil and is taken seriously as a “realistic” measure of human worth.
Why the kill line feels persuasive
For many young Chinese netizens, the kill line feels intuitive. They were born long after 1989 and raised under patriotic education that blends Marxist materialism, atheism, and state‑led nationalism, with little exposure to alternative moral or political narratives. Many are materially better off than their parents and have seen “the West” as a consumer experience: they wear Nike, drink Starbucks, use Apple, are constantly on (Chinese) social media, and travel abroad when they can. One Chinese student at a Washington-area university told me, “What America offers, like food, subways, entertainment—we have it better in China.”
Materially, that may sometimes be true. But beyond a commercial experience of America, there is often a hollowed knowledge of America as a civic and religious society, producing a strange combination of familiarity and distance—a sense that America is both known and alien, tainted with anti-West hostility. Even when Chinese students are studying in the United States, many still get their news about America through PRC platforms behind the Great Firewall; their view remains filtered by party ideological socialization.
Analyses of Chinese state media have long noted recurring anti‑America themes: the United States as a dangerous hegemon, as morally and socially degenerate, and as a power in irreversible decline. These narratives, now amplified by AI, do not merely reflect a bad image of America; they persuade domestic audiences that China’s system is superior. The kill line slots neatly into that repertoire: in its vivid way, by counting Americans’ pocketbooks and bank accounts, it insists that American capitalism is finished.
Propaganda hardens into conventional wisdom
Over time, propaganda campaigns harden into conventional wisdom when there are no alternative perspectives inside the firewall to challenge a state-run narrative. Since the 1990s, patriotic and ideological education in China has worked to cultivate grass-roots loyalty to the CCP and to instill a Marxist, officially atheist worldview. Political education targets youth to teach them to trust the system, uphold Marxist atheism, distrust “foreign” religion, and despise Western democracies.
China’s market transition has further deepened materialist values. Sociological studies describe a cultural shift in which wealth, consumption, and status become salient markers of self‑worth in this “socialist” country. Younger urban Chinese are more likely to say that income and possessions define whether life is going well. In marriage markets, high bride prices, property requirements, and salary cutoffs reinforce a merciless message: if you do not have money, you are not worthy of love or respect.
Many Chinese intellectuals speak of a “moral crisis”: Confucian norms were broken, Marxism‑Leninism has lost credibility, yet obedience to leader’s thoughts is mandatory, and religion—often the source of moral inspiration elsewhere—is largely suppressed. In such a vacuum, what keeps “everyday morality” going is a mix of party doctrine, mandatory yet performative study of Leader’s Thought, and the materialist imperative to survive in a high‑pressure involuted economy. A generation guided by party ideology to distrust faith and charity, to equate wealth with dignity, and to see the United States as a declining rival will naturally read American poverty as evidence of a kill line.
Party-directed sentiment, cultivated aloofness
The party’s cyber control tactics further reinforce this orientation by redirecting attention from sensitive topics that might spark collective action. Party propaganda workers rarely engage in open debate; instead, they flood the zone with distractions, “positive energy” slogans, funny videos, memes, entertainment, or even porn—so real information dies of neglect rather than defeat.
This produces a dual tactic. On some issues—such as American poverty—the public is nudged to care deeply and to see these issues as proof of US decay. On others—regime collapse abroad, unrest in Venezuela, or uprising in Iran—the dominant message becomes guided aloofness: “What does this have to do with me?” The result is a public sphere where many people feel intensely about foreign stories that confirm the party line and strangely distant from events that might trigger doubt. The kill line thrives inside that managed sentiment.
This is not to say Chinese culture is cold. Chinese traditions and Chinese people are humane and warm, capable of deep compassion and dignity. But within a hollow atheist-socialist framework where material metrics trumps dignity and where moral life is sanctioned through party doctrine alone, that traditional warmth is suppressed and redirected into state‑approved sentiment. “Kill line”—a phrase merciless and final— captures that ill redirection.
What the kill line misses
The kill line notion misses precisely what sustains moral life in plural civic societies: religious communities, volunteer networks, neighborhood groups, and local nonprofit institutions that shoulder burdens when the state cannot. In the United States, churches and faith-based groups have long served the homeless, the addicts, and the poor. In Asia, Buddhist networks such as Tzu Chi have modeled charity as a noble religious duty. Kindness toward strangers becomes a social habit, a moral habit—not just a state function.
By contrast, as Fei Xiaotong long argued, traditional Chinese society is a “differential mode of association”: obligations radiate outward from the self in concentric circles—family first, kin and clan second, strangers last. When that kin-based orientation meets a state claiming monopoly over public care and restricting unauthorized charities—especially religious ones—random acts of kindness become rare. The result is a thinner public ethic toward strangers: a de facto kill line.
Rebuilding a lifeline
One prominent Chinese scholar compared China’s moral crisis to “a heart disease” that requires nothing less than “a new heart and a blood transfusion,” suggesting that religious renewal is central to China’s moral recovery.
If the grip of an authoritarian regime ever loosens and China seeks a richer moral imagination, it must allow the civic and religious actors that cultivate grace, mercy, and second chances to flourish. When moral language is monopolized by the state and decades of atheist, materialist education teach people to equate dignity with wealth and conformity, a meme like the kill line feels like common sense.
There are practical steps we can take from this side. The meme began with an account by a single visitor whose short stay was amplified into a moral accusation. That should remind us that the Chinese students, tourists, and scholars who still pass through the United States are among the few channels who can carry a more accurate picture back through the firewall, even as AI-empowered censorship tightens control over cyberspace.
Policymakers, foundations, universities, and local communities should treat those encounters as critical opportunities for durable influence. Most Chinese students in the United States are in STEM programs and often have little structured exposure to American civic life beyond campus. It is imperative to design culturally sensitive civic engagement programs or service learning partnerships that invite international students to witness the essence of American civic and religious life. For example: listen to public debates, attend court proceedings, learn rule-of-law principles, observe religious services, experience a free press, volunteer at soup kitchens, join Thanksgiving dinners, or visit recovery groups.
Imagining a genuinely plural, caring Chinese society requires legal and civic space where the state cannot dictate whom people should care for or what sentiments they may express, and where religious communities, nonprofits, and grass-roots associations—can flourish and do the everyday work of making God-given dignity evident. That is the only way to weaken the “kill line” and turn it into a lifeline.
