This morning, the Guardian’s Amy Hawkins offers a delightful split-screen portrait of global consciousness, highlighting two trends playing out in parallel on US and Chinese social media.
- On US platforms like TikTok and Instagram, “young people are diving into the joys of Chinese culture — from drinking hot water to playing mahjong — all under the banner of ‘Chinamaxxing,’” she writes.
- On the Chinese internet, meanwhile, “the US is losing its decades-long grip on soft power, and is instead being replaced by a darker trend: the kill line.”
Hawkins explains that Chinese social media, blogs, and academic journals have lately taken to depicting “a vision of the US as a dystopian capitalist hell,” governed by what a Chinese news presenter called “a ‘kill line’ in American society where the middle class plummets into the underclass.”
The kill line “exposes America’s dual nature: the winners achieve ultimate success, while the losers fall into an abyss from which there is no return.”
The backstory:
The latest trend started in November, when a Chinese student living in Seattle posted a five-hour-long stream to the Chinese video-sharing website BiliBili. In the video, which has since attracted more than 3m views, he describes seeing hungry children at Halloween and the harsh realities of life for disadvantaged people in the world’s biggest economy. Soon, the term “kill line” took on a life of its own.
The meme has so captured the Chinese imagination that at a press conference at Davos in January, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent was repeatedly asked to comment on the kill line by a Chinese state media journalist.
“I don’t understand the question,” he replied. (No kidding.)
Bernie Sanders never tires of pointing out that 60 percent of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, which infuriates a certain type of online wonk for some reason. When I posted about the phenomenon last year, I illustrated the point with the…
Auteur: Seth Ackerman
