China 2026: Junge Welt Travel Report

The expression has been making waves in China’s social networks for a few weeks now: “Kill line.” It comes from the world of Chinese computer games. Anyone who has crossed this “death line” will be permanently eliminated with the next strike. In the current context, however, it is about something else: about the fact that many people in the USA are so poorly secured materially that a single stroke of fate is enough to plunge them permanently into bitter poverty. The debate was initiated by a 22-year-old Chinese man who until recently studied medicine in Seattle and, in his part-time job as a forensic assistant, collected the bodies of people who no longer cared for at the time of their death, people without a home, for example. Shocked by what he saw, he began documenting poverty in the United States on social networks under the name King Si Kui Qi (roughly: slippery king) – frozen homeless people, unaffordable costs for medical treatment. He coined the term “American kill line” to describe the individual descent into misery.

King Si Kui Qi’s videos have had a particularly strong impact on China’s younger generation and have awakened many people’s awareness of the real social conditions in the USA beyond the Hollywood glitter. Facts such as the fact that almost 40 percent of all US adults are unable to pay $400 in emergencies – such as medical treatment – are becoming increasingly common knowledge. And they provoke comparisons. While basic medical care in China is largely guaranteed by state health insurance, King Si Kui Qi shows gaping gaps in US health care. A hospital birth costs at least ten times more in the USA than in China. While in China the proportion of people living on less than three US dollars a day fell from 83 percent in 1990 to zero percent in 2019, according to World Bank data, in the USA it was 1.25 percent in 2022 – around three times as high as in 1990 and rising. And while in China the poorest tenth of the population owns 3.1 percent of the total national income, the comparable figure in the USA is 1.8 percent.

It is not the case that there is ignorance in the People’s Republic about the social conditions in the United States. Countless Chinese tourists regularly notice the homeless people living in abject poverty in major US cities. Residents of Chinese metropolises always look down on the situation in the subway in New York in an unpleasant way. The political situation and rampant racism – the official rate of so-called hate crimes against people of Asian origin has been at an all-time high for years – have now also seriously scratched the finish of US propaganda. As early as 2023, a Stanford University survey found that 45 percent of all scientists with a Chinese background avoided applying for US government funding to avoid being targeted by the authorities. 61 percent thought about leaving the country because of political pressure and the threat of racism. All sorts of reports about top scientists who have returned home from the USA have long been making the rounds in the Chinese media.

With the youth term “kill line,” King Si Kui Qi has now reached the generation that is thinking about studying in the USA. In the West this has led to defensive reflexes. The New York Times (NOW) complained in mid-January that reports about poverty in the USA were only intended to distract from the fact that not everything was going well in China either. European media – from Economist bis The time – followed up. This will have little impact on the debate in China. Only King Si Kui Qi was hit. When he realized that according to the report of the… NYT threatened to get caught in the crossfire, especially since Chinese government opponents had made his real name public, he fled headlong, as China expert Arnaud Bertrand reported on his blog on Thursday: He sought safety in the People’s Republic.