Some Chinese netizens have asked me about the concept of a ZhanShaXian, a "kill line," "decapitation line," or "cut-off line" in the United States. The concept, as I understand it, is essentially that a person in the United States can reach a point of downward spiral, where conditions worsen and worsen and there's no real coming back from; those who have reached this moment of rapid deterioration have crossed the kill line. In my opinion, this line is real or becoming more real, and it is a very serious to me. It is real enough that this line is not just an abstract concept to me, is specific names and faces of people I know, people for whom I am not sure how they are going to make it.
In every capitalist society, and in the societies before them, life is like a mountain or a slope, with some people reaching higher statuses and others only reaching a lower status. In China, you have the Two Assurances and the Three Guarantees (LiangBuChouSanBaoZhang) and other such protections for those at the bottom. But for countries like the United States, at the bottom of the slope is not a floor but a pit, which is nearly impossible to climb out of. Medical emergency, criminal record (including some who are falsely accused), losing your job, taking on too much debt, being born with a disability or chronic health condition, natural disaster, drug or alcohol addiction, unexpected pregnancy, serious domestic abuse situation, these are events which, if they happen to you, could dramatically effect what kinds of jobs you will be able to obtain, where you can live, what kind of life you will be able to have.
For some people, that is a life of poverty, unable to move out of their parents home, unable to make more than a minimum wage, unable to buy a car (necessary for transportation in most places in the United States). In the case of a medical issue, it could mean unable to pay for your relatives cancer treatment, not be able to get the back surgery you need, an ambulance that will never make it to your part of the city in time. It is worse for those who can't afford a home and don't have any friends or relatives willing to take them in, and must become homeless. These people sleep on the streets, no possessions because there is no place to keep them or they got stolen or they got rained on, no chance at a bath or a haircut, no home address they can use to open a bank account or apply for assistance. They may struggle to keep regular access to a computer or phone that will allow them to get a job, or they might have a job that pays so poorly they have to go sleep in their car between work shifts, nowhere else to go.
For capitalism dominated societies like the United States, this is not an unfortunate accident of the system but an economic necessity. If there was enough homes and healthcare for everyone, they wouldn't be as profitable, if everyone had a job, the ones who have jobs wouldn't be forced to stay in them, no matter the burden. Over a million people in the United States struggle with homelessness and and tens of thousands of people die because they don't have access to healthcare so that healthcare executives like Brian Thompson and real estate investors like Donald Trump can have a better financial portfolio. In the United States, the slope is a see-saw, where the rich get richer by pushing everyone down.
And it got worse during the pandemic. Not a month after the lockdown from the pandemic, economists on Epstein's list were telling the news that people had to go back to work to make the stock lines go up again. So poor people, disproportionately black people and immigrants, risked their life to go back to work at restaurants so that unmasked white boomers could have nachos inside an Applebee's again. Over a million people died in the United States, four times the percentage that China had, millions more suffering from long Covid. In New York, they piled coffins in the park because they were building up so fast they had no one where else to put them. Estimates say that the richest 1% got 50 trillion dollars richer over that same time period.
As I said, these are just numbers to me, but people I know. There is C, who stayed at my house for a few months because she had gotten into an abusive relationship with a man who opened up credit cards her name and wrecked her credit score so badly she wasn't able to rent an apartment anymore, who had a decent job until she was fired because she took a few days to take care of her brother who got sick with COVID. There is J, the trans woman who taught me how to clean pepper spray out of someone's eyes who years later has too much depression and PTSD to keep a job and for whom my spouse helped go shopping for camping tents. There's K, my spouses best friend who we cannot visit anymore because she spends all her time doing freelance work until her hands cramp up, who has a heart condition from long Covid and has difficulties with stairs because she has the knees of someone twice her age. There's S, a trans man I helped drive to the motel but who went back to his house a week later because living with the man who hit him was easier than being able to live on one's own, who wanted me stop by a convenience store to buy kratom because he had a toothache but couldn't afford the dental surgery, who already had been homeless once before and was still prone to sunstroke because of it. I don't have enough resources to help all the people I know who need it, I've been helping J for years now and she's still struggling. These people are struggling to maintain speed on a kill treadmill which could easily pull them down one day.
As these are just the people I know as a white boy who went to college. Over at the poor black part of town, there are streets that flood with shit-infected sewage when it rains to heavy, people who no longer flinch at the sight of cockroaches because they are so used to seeing them, cramped apartments that take months to fix the air conditioning or the fridgerator, single mothers who have to walk for two hours in the sun across traffic to get fresh food or the closest thing their daughters will have to a piece of fruit is a pop-tart, boys who stop paying attention at school because they believe that they probably won't make it to the age of 20 anyways. There are many people in every city who have been on this line for years that people still above the line never get a chance to meet, I don't know them, but I know their stories.
And everyone my age agrees it's been getting worse in recent years. Grocery prices, gas prices, housing prices, healthcare prices, and now electricity prices remain high and climbing. The job market is a nightmare, jobs that are basically scams, jobs that are actually scams, jobs that aren't actually hiring, jobs with a long and cumbersome hiring process, jobs that reject you using AI, and very few quality jobs available. It's all so obviously bad you can just "with everything that's been going on in recent years" and people know what you mean. Half the people my age are in a near-constant state of anxiety from the Trump administration. This year began with funding cuts to food stamps, medicaid, unemployment benefits, the labor board, all the things that have been trying and failing at keeping people above the line, defunding cuts made permanent now with Trump's big beautiful bill. Prices are so bad we can't tell what's tariffs and what's just the inflation that was already happening.
When myself and others talk about the rise of fascism in the United States, the kill line is a big part of what we are talking about. Under fascism, the slope steepens, the kill line grows and sharpens, and the pit at the bottom becomes a hungry set of jaws. In Nazi Germany, they called people like my friends "useless eaters" and they executed the disabled and the mentally ill, smoke rising in the air from the cremated bodies. "Eugenics," the Nazis called this idea that the strong and white should be allowed to stay above the kill line, the weak and different forced below it, a term they learned partially from academics in the United States.
The kill line in the United States is real and becoming more real, and it's not just an abstract exercise for us, we can see it happening in our everyday lives. I don't what will happen to my friends on the treadmill as the speed increases. I will try to help them and we will try to band together to resist and fight but I know there will be a lot of loss. Part of me is grieving them already. Every society struggling to fully provide for all of its people but believe me when I say that the United States is not something that China should want to imitate. Be proud of the common prosperity and the principal of "serve the people" that your country has, and never let go of it, the alternative is much darker than you realize.
