For weeks, China’s online media ecosystem has been obsessed with tales of misery from America’s broken healthcare system.
Video-sharing platforms and online message boards have been swamped with discussions about America’s “kill line” – a concept taken from Chinese gaming culture to describe the point at which a player needs just one more blow to wipe them out.
It went viral after the term was repackaged by a Chinese international student living in Seattle to riff on the precariousness of life in America where a single medical crisis can financially cripple even a middle-class person.
In long rambling videos uploaded to Chinese video platform Bilibili, he recounted unverified anecdotes about Americans who were hit with crushing medical debt, driving them into poverty and homelessness. There are doubts about the veracity of some aspects of his tales, but whether they are true or not is almost beside the point.
The callousness at the heart of America’s medical debt crisis hardly needs exaggeration, especially for those of us buttressed by taxpayer-funded safety nets.
What’s interesting is how the topic became a proxy for the perceived virtues of China’s socialist model and the moral bankruptcy of America’s capitalist system. In holding up a mirror to Chinese society, the online debate showcased a shifting perception in how many Chinese citizens see themselves compared with the country against which they have long benchmarked their quality of life.
“For the first time, this made me, a middle-aged person, feel fear of this world. Their people are really so pitiful. Then I realised how wonderful it is to live in a socialist country,” a Chinese user posted in response to one video.
“If you’re a capitalist, America is good. If you’re an ordinary person, China is good,” said another.
These sentiments, expressed across tens of thousands of comments, are grounded in a justified pride at China’s rapid economic transformation over three decades, which has been genuinely remarkable.
Almost 800 million people have been lifted out of poverty, China’s educated and prosperous middle class has burgeoned, and the country is on par with, or poised to eclipse, the US in a range of high-tech industries.
But not everyone bought this version. As some commentators argued, before the government censors kicked in, this fixation with American inequality was a false panacea, one that appealed to schadenfreude and nationalistic chest-beating, and obscured honest introspection about China’s own challenges.
“You gain not the truth, but a cheap, illusory sense of superiority,” wrote Li Yuchen, a legal blogger, in an essay that has now been scrubbed from the Chinese internet.
“You think you’ve won, won big.”
He argued that systemic inequality had also been built into China’s hukou (household registration) system, which classifies each citizen as either an urban or rural resident and limits the state and welfare services they can access to their designated region, thereby constraining their freedom of movement and their social mobility.
“At the moment of your birth, [it] determines what kind of education, medical care and social security resources you can enjoy in the next few decades. This line cuts off the possibility of ‘being born equal’,” Li wrote.
“These are our ‘kill lines’.”
Among the most affected by the hukou system are the hundreds of millions of Chinese migrant workers – the rural poor – who move to cities in search of low-paid labouring or factory jobs, grinding out an existence on the fringes with almost no safety net.
In my travels through China over the past 18 months, people have been surprisingly frank about the tough economic times they are enduring. The fallout from China’s devastating real estate market collapse has rippled across society. Property prices are in multi-year decline, hammering middle-class wealth. For migrant workers, jobs have become more scarce as construction activity has halted, while state employees have seen wages stagnate for years as local governments drown in debt.
With people spending less, those working in the consumer economy, from roadside hawkers to restaurants workers and shop owners, have seen their incomes backslide.
Nonetheless, what began as organic online discussion among everyday Chinese citizens has proved irresistible fodder for the state propaganda machine, which rarely misses an opportunity to mine the fault lines in American society while foregoing an examination of its own.
In the kill line trend, Beijing has found a politically useful tool to leverage at a time when its own economy is facing slowing growth and people are increasingly anxious about their livelihoods, says Lizzi C Lee, a fellow on Chinese Economy at the Asia Society Policy Institute.
“This narrative also helps divert dissatisfaction away from China’s own problems outward, along the lines of ‘things are even worse elsewhere, especially in the US’.”
As one headline in state-run newspaper China Daily framed it: “US ‘kill line’ in stark contrast to China’s supportive policies”, which topped an article that championed the Chinese Communist Party’s pledges to expand its own underdeveloped social safety net. Xinhua, another outlet, opined about the death of the American Dream at the hands of wealth inequality.
Even the party’s top theoretical magazine, Qiushi, which publishes the official philosophy of the Chinese president, “Xi Jinping Thought”, weighed in this month. The kill line, it said, exposed the cold logic of the capitalist system which prioritised profit “before workers’ survival, security and dignity.”
Propaganda worth its salt contains at least a kernel of truth, with its agenda revealed in the facts it chooses to ignore as much as those it promotes.
The economic data shows the US remains significantly wealthier on a per capita basis, with higher average incomes and greater social security coverage than in China, says Lee, while China has low wages but better basic healthcare coverage and family-based safety nets.
In cherry-picking comparison points, perhaps there are other “kill lines” worth contemplating. For example, the moment a mother or an ICU nurse encounters federal immigration agents on the streets of Minneapolis. Or when a critic in China dares to question the party machine.
Only in one system will you find open public debate about these things.
As Li, the blogger, challenged his comrades: “Don’t they really know that every word they scold the United States with is like a boomerang, which can accurately hit back their own people?”
Lisa Visentin is the North Asia correspondent for The Sydney Morning Herald
Get a note directly from our foreign correspondents on what’s making headlines around the world. Sign up for our weekly What in the World newsletter.
Lisa Visentin is the North Asia correspondent for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. She was previously a federal political reporter based in Canberra.Connect via Twitter or email.
