Recently, this one concept has been circulating on Chinese social media.

Kill line, which is a sort of gamer speak for the point at which a video game character can be killed off with one blow.

That's Josh Chin, senior global correspondent for the Wall Street Journal based in Asia.

And Chinese social media users for the past several months have been talking a lot about the American kill line,

this idea that life in America is so precarious that anyone is just like a lost job away from being homeless.

Or, you know, and then, you know, you can lose your health insurance.

You could not be able to pay rent.

Inflation is out of control.

And that, like, that people in the U.S. are always on the verge of some sort of disaster.

I feel pretty confident that this was not the idea of America that President Trump,

his administration, and the tag-along band of CEOs at the U.S.-China summit wanted to convey.

It's telling that one of the first things Xi Jinping did upon meeting Trump

was tell him that not handling Taiwan correctly could lead to an extremely dangerous situation.

You don't generally lean on a country you're threatened by.

This message that the U.S. is this sort of dangerous and chaotic place is starting to gain traction in China in a way that I hope they've seen before.

And, you know, that's, that can't help but have an impact on, you know, the way that any U.S. leader is interacting with the Chinese leader. I mean, in the past,

most Chinese people sort of saw the U.S. as a shining city on a hill and they really, you know,

you would have George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, when they visited,

they would have these public events and there would be huge crowds who come out to see them.

And, you know, they were quite admired. And even, you know, Chinese state media would carry their, I mean, obviously, censored versions of their remarks, but they would carry their remarks. And so, and you just don't get as much of that. I mean, probably that's because China doesn't want to give Trump that sort of platform. But also, I think there's just the feelings that Chinese people have towards the U.S.

are much more complicated than they used to be.

Today on the show, a fractured America, a skeptical China, and a profoundly interconnected economy.

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