Certain beliefs about the United States once seemed unshakable in China: that America was hopelessly far ahead, for example, and that moving there guaranteed a better life. That’s no longer how people talk in Beijing, where I live, or on Chinese social media.
These days, the chatter is more about the precarity of life in the United States. A term from gaming has gone viral on social media: Zhanshaxian, or the “kill line,” is the point at which only one more hit is needed to knock a player out. Americans allegedly live alongside it, buying on credit, carrying heavy debt, and perpetually one illness, accident, or lost job away from financial catastrophe. Posts that draw thousands of comments discuss how easily Americans can fall into homelessness, show clips of U.S. graduates crying over their student loans, and compare life in the U.S. to the dystopian science-fiction show Black Mirror.
America’s halo has dimmed in part because consumer goods in China have become more affordable. Chinese salaries remain far lower than American ones, but homegrown industry has made certain comforts more accessible, such that living in the U.S. no longer appears to be a clear upgrade. People who travel or live abroad often report missing the amenities of home: Chinese apps such as Alibaba’s Taobao, which sells virtually everything at a lower price than in the United States, or mass-transit systems that are cleaner and more modern than American ones.
Conversations on social media have sharpened these comparisons. A flood of Americans joined China’s RedNote (a social-media platform similar to Instagram) in response to a brief ban of TikTok last year. Users in China and the United States shared the costs of necessities—rent, groceries, bills—with one another under the tag “#U.S.-China receipts.” The larger U.S. paycheck started to look less impressive when set against this accounting.
The erosion of America’s image is particularly striking for those old enough to hold earlier impressions in mind. Gao Xiangjin, formerly in the Chinese navy, recalled to me that the U.S. was once presented in exclusively negative terms. “We saw them as enemies,” he said. But after China’s Reform and Opening in the late 1970s, he said, the view shifted in a positive direction. His generation became aware of American contributions to Chinese success—such as when American experts consulted with China to help manage the Yellow River’s flooding, or when the U.S. allied with China in its war against Japan, or how the Rockefeller Foundation initially funded Peking Union Medical College Hospital, still one of Beijing’s top hospitals.
He read books about the U.S. Constitution, sent his daughter to America to study, and traveled to the country himself. Back home, he became active in his residential community’s landlord association, which he described as “the most democratic institution in China” because it has its own selection and voting processes.
Chinese liberals such as Gao still hold American ideals in high esteem, but now feel that President Trump’s government isn’t living up to them. “I didn’t think he’d be this bad,” Gao said of Trump. He cited American policies toward Greenland, Europe, and Ukraine, saying, “The U.S. seems to be abandoning its ideals and shirking its responsibilities.” He told me that he found the fatal shooting of Renee Good by an ICE agent particularly terrifying. Of Trump, he added, “I’m sure he’s jealous of Xi and Putin.”
Even before Trump took office, Chinese citizens had begun to reassess the premium they’d long placed on obtaining an American education, whatever the cost. The sheer number of graduates returning to China from the United States had come to dilute the value of an American degree. Under the Trump administration, those concerns have been compounded by new uncertainty surrounding student visas—making other destinations, or even staying put, ever more attractive than studying in the United States.
Moreover, China’s sluggish economy has made an expensive overseas education impractical for many families, especially given the diminishing return on the investment. In 2024, China’s Ministry of Education reported that 495,000 students had returned from abroad—79,400 more than in 2023. The job market in China is tight, and foreign graduates don’t have the competitive edge they used to. Some civil-service openings even exclude those educated abroad. “State institutions and enterprises prefer domestically educated graduates,” Chim Lee, a senior analyst at the British-based research organization Economist Intelligence Unit, told me.
Some Chinese students pursuing their degrees in the United States have brought home stories of disillusionment. I spoke with a graduate student in economics who requested anonymity because she was in the process of renewing her U.S. visa. She’d watched Lizzy McGuire as a child and thought school life in the U.S. seemed more colorful and inventive than in China. But while studying in Chicago, she grew anxious about her personal safety, especially on public transport and while walking home alone after dark. She’d rarely had such worries in China. She compared living in the U.S. to visiting a theme park: mesmerizing for a child, but less appealing a decade later.
When discussions of the “kill line” began circulating on Chinese social media, she recognized that many of the stories were real but that others were exaggerated clickbait—for example, posts claiming that small fines for infractions such as not mowing one’s lawn might send a homeowner down the slippery slope to repossession.
Some commenters online wondered if the kill-line discussions were a way to deflect attention from China’s problems. Although the authorities tightly monitor discussion of domestic political issues, they tend not to censor criticism of other countries, and they give prominent online nationalists particular leeway. The economics student disagreed that this alone explained the kill line’s virality. “People naturally have curiosity about how other people are living,” she told me. “Sometimes discussing poverty over there is just because people like gossiping.”
The United States still matters to people in China as a point of reference. But these days, the reference is commonly negative, at least with regards to food prices, medical bills, guns, drugs, and urban safety. America’s cultural exports now compete with many others, including China’s. And U.S. industry no longer dominates many sectors—not technology, where China is a major contender, and certainly not green energy, where China is particularly strong. The kill-line discourse captures the growing skepticism that America is inherently a better place to live.