‘Kill line’ an inevitable outcome of US system

Finance is rewriting rules of survival

By Ma Jiahong

In the United States, the manufacturing sector temporarily alleviated the pressure of falling profit rates through technological innovation and industrial transformation after World War II. However, since the 1970s, intensified global industrial competition and rising domestic labor costs have led to a long-term decline in profit rates within the real economy. This decline has moved capital toward financialization.

Financial capital has since become the dominant force governing the economic system. It has not resolved the underlying tendency of the profit rate to fall but has instead displaced and amplified this contradiction. The distinctive feature of financial capital lies in its pursuit of profit primarily through the self-expansion of capital rather than through the creation of surplus value in the real economy. Consequently, the stability of the US economy no longer hinges on the development of its real economy but instead relies on risk management in the financial markets and sustained global confidence in dollar-denominated assets.

The core issue for capital is no longer how to expand employment and enhance the production of life’s necessities, but rather how to avoid failure and evade costs amid increasingly unstable conditions for value realization. To shift these costs, the burden is transferred onto individuals.

During the industrialization phase, there was a relatively stable relationship between capital and labor, as capital had to bear the cost of workers’ subsistence to maintain the balance between production and consumption. However, in the current financialization stage, capital can disrupt the stability of traditional employment through various means, transferring the risks of the labor process entirely onto individuals. Workers therefore face unstable income and a constant risk of unemployment.

Building upon this logic, the evolution leads toward a credit system that binds individual subsistence to the financial markets, ultimately making individuals the final bearers of risks associated with surplus value realization. By leveraging critical thresholds such as credit scores, income levels, and employment status, the labor force is segmented into the usable and the expendable.

Furthermore, through mortgages, auto loans, student debt and medical loans, individuals are integrated into the consumption system, transforming them into vehicles for capital appreciation. However, those who fall below the critical threshold, the kill line, are abandoned by capital and excluded from the reproduction systems. The essence of this mechanism is that capital only remunerates labor that has already been successfully converted into profit, while externalizing all costs associated with labor that fails to generate appreciation. This way, the expenses of labor reproduction are passed onto individuals.

This intensifies labor exploitation and pushes it into an even more severe phase. By tethering access to education, health care and other essentials to personal debt and creditworthiness, the credit system directly links an individual’s right to subsistence with their financial standing. Consequently, unemployment, illness or a damaged credit history results in the loss of not merely income, but also the eligibility to re-enter social reproduction. This constitutes the underlying logic of the kill line — the mechanism governing social reproduction.

The author is an associate professor at the School of International Studies of Renmin University of China. The views don’t necessarily represent those of China Daily.

Algorithmic ‘kill line’: How US law legalizes social cleansing

By Chen Qi

The kill line is not merely a gaming metaphor for a poverty threshold; it has evolved into a brutal legal reality in the contemporary United States. While this invisible line cuts across finance, healthcare and insurance, it is most lethal in the rental market. For the American working class, housing eligibility is the ultimate safety fuse. Without a fixed address, one cannot open a bank account, receive court summons, or maintain child guardianship. The algorithmic denial of housing does not just deprive people of shelter; it effectively erases their legal personhood, turning them into “digital refugees” in their own country.

The case of Louis v. SafeRent Solutions illustrates this absurdity. Mary Louis, a black woman holding a federal “Section 8” housing voucher, was instantly rejected by an algorithm. Legally, the voucher represents the sovereign credit of the US government, theoretically reducing her default risk to zero. Yet, the private algorithm overruled this public guarantee. It rejected her solely based on non-rent debts stemming from structural poverty — primarily medical bills. Here, private code superseded public law, declaring government guarantees invalid in the commercial sphere.

Why does the US legal system, often hailed as a champion of human rights, allow such survival deprivation? The answer is not that the law is absent, but that it is complicit. The legal system has mutated into a machine that legitimizes social cleansing. Specifically, the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) and the Fair Housing Act (FHA) have entered into a structural collusion with data capital.

First, the law validates zombie data. While the FCRA requires data to be accurate, courts often interpret this rigidly as “historically correct,” ignoring predictive errors. Algorithms routinely scrape old arrest records — even those later dismissed — to label innocent tenants as high-risk. The law cares only that the arrest happened, not that the person is innocent.

Second, “trade secrets” have become a license to discriminate. When tenants sue for bias under the FHA, they face a legal “Catch-22”: to win, they must prove how the algorithm works; but courts often deny access to the algorithm to protect corporate intellectual property. Under the banner of innovation, the law shields discrimination from scrutiny.

Consequently, the power to decide “who can live in the city” — a core function of sovereignty — has been outsourced to private firms. Landlords become “proxy police,” and algorithms serve as the executioners. This “privatization of sovereignty” means the US government has effectively abdicated its duty to protect the survival rights of its poorest citizens.

Ultimately, the kill line reveals the Social Darwinism embedded in US governance: poverty is treated as an individual sin, and the law facilitates the “culling” of the weak to maintain capital efficiency. This stands in stark contrast to China’s approach. The absence of such a systemic kill line in China is not due to a difference in technology, but a difference in political logic. While the US system privatizes risk and abandons the vulnerable, the Chinese path emphasizes “survival backstopping” — using state power to block the fall into destitution. The divergence lies in whether the law serves the unlimited accumulation of capital or the fundamental welfare of the people.

The author is an associate professor at the School of Law in Sun Yat-Sen University. The views don’t necessarily represent those of China Daily.

Right policies can stop downward spiral

By Jiang Yu

In physics, there are four concepts of equilibrium. The first is stable equilibrium, which is like a helium balloon held by a child. When disturbed, it has the resilience to return to its original position. The second is unstable equilibrium, referring to a state where an object appears balanced when stationary, but once slightly displaced, it moves quickly away from that position.

The third is neutral equilibrium, exemplified by a glass marble on a flat table — when disturbed, it moves but comes to rest wherever the external force stops. It remains in equilibrium without returning to its original position or moving further. In everyday terms, this can be likened to a situation where it’s hard for individuals to significantly increase income or completely fall into poverty, but maintaining a basic standard of living is manageable. The fourth is metastable equilibrium. In this state, individuals can recover from small disturbances, but a sufficient deviation would irreversibly lead them to another state.

These concepts can be used to develop a quantitative model for the kill line. Essentially, this framework would address two key questions: whether resilience exists, and in which direction it operates. This means, does a kill line exist if a society is in a state of dynamic equilibrium. After the equilibrium is disrupted, do individuals accelerate into decline toward an unstable equilibrium, or is there a restoring force that enables them to return to a stable equilibrium?

Using this framework, we can take the United States and China as examples. For the US, those living in poverty can be seen as existing in a stable equilibrium at a low level. They have essentially hit the bottom with little room to fall further, and there is no systematic poverty alleviation effort to lift them out. Instead, industries such as processed food, pharmaceuticals and the drug trade exploit this demographic, keeping them in a state of stable equilibrium with low living standards. Meanwhile, the elites or capitalists in the US, facilitated by mechanisms such as the “revolving door”, which describes the transition of public officials into lobbyists of industries, are also in a stable equilibrium.

On the other hand, the US middle class, which is the primary target of the kill line, is in a state of unstable equilibrium. The kill line is a critical threshold for this segment of the population. Once it gets breached, there is no force that can return these individuals to stability. Instead, mechanisms exist that accelerate their downward mobility.

In contrast, China’s low-income population demonstrates resilience in returning to a stable equilibrium. This is the fundamental difference between the situation in the US and in China.

This resilience is underpinned by the central authorities’ commitment to poverty alleviation, the collective ownership of land, and equal access to basic public services. These institutional safeguards create a social safety net, enabling those who fall into poverty to regain stability.

Through its nationwide poverty alleviation campaign, China has successfully lifted its low-income population out of poverty. For China’s middle-income group, there is no pronounced mechanism of unstable equilibrium or the kill line. Even if individuals face financial setbacks, they often have alternatives — such as relocating to a smaller county where housing is more affordable — where they can maintain a relatively decent standard of living with their savings. China’s institutional framework prevents the emergence of a kill line within its middle-income group.

The author is a research fellow of the Center for International Knowledge on Development. The views don’t necessarily represent those of China Daily.