Top Tweets for #KillLine

This is a genuinely incredible story. The hottest term on Chinese social media right now is “kill-line”: if you go to Xiaohongshu, Bilibili or Douyin, everyone is speaking about it. Why? It all has to do with the story of Alex, known as “牢A” (“Láo A”, literally “prison A” where A stands for Alex), a Chinese medical/biology student based in Seattle, USA, who worked part-time as a forensic assistant collecting unclaimed bodies (primarily homeless people). You’ve doubtlessly never heard of him but he probably single-handedly shattered what remained of the “American Dream” myth for an entire generation of young Chinese. In late 2025, Alex started going massively viral on Bilibili, a Chinese video platform, for videos where he described poverty in America. He coined the term “kill line” (“斩杀线”) - an expression borrowed from gaming describing when a game character's health is so low one hit will finish them. In Alex’s framing, the concept describes how a single shock (illness, job loss, accident) can push middle-class Americans into irreversible poverty. It’s hard to overstate the cultural impact he’s had in China. In barely a few weeks, “kill line” became part of everyday lexicon. So much so that even Qiushi - the core theoretical journal of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China - published a lengthy theoretical analysis using "kill line" as its central framework (https://t.co/8VRe3xNj8S). This never happens. Gaming slang coined by a 22-year-old streamer based in the U.S. does not become the analytical framework for Qiushi, the CPC’s core theoretical journal, in just a handful of weeks. That’s normally not how Communist Party theory gets crafted, to put it mildly 😂. And yet here we are - which goes to show just how powerfully Alex resonated. It didn’t take long for America to notice - and for Alex’s problems to start. Due to the staggering resonance his content was having in China, Alex became the target of an extremely vicious doxxing campaign by Chinese dissidents. He also got targeted by Western media with the New York Times, among others, publishing a piece (https://t.co/dOtHBR6Eu3) identifying him as the origin of the phenomenon which they described - unsurprisingly - as Communist propaganda meant to “deflect criticism of [Chinese] leaders.” I just wrote an article telling the full story. It ends with Alex escaping to China in an extraction worthy of a Cold War spy novel. Think about how extraordinary this is: a Chinese student fleeing to China for safety, because he feared for his life after being harassed for describing poverty in America. Full story here: https://t.co/3vzUmnGurq