The Discursive Construction of the “Death Line”: A Critical Metaphor Analysis of Chinese and U.S. Media Discourse

Abstract

In late 2025, a term from Chinese multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) gaming culture— “Death line”—migrated from an in-game threshold of vulnerability into a political metaphor for the point beyond which ordinary Americans may face cascading financial hardship. This article applies Critical Metaphor Analysis to four purposively selected texts: two reports published by Xinhua News Agency and reproduced by People’s Daily Online, one Newsweek report, and one New York Times commentary. The selected Chinese texts primarily use structural and ontological metaphors to frame financial precarity as an institutional outcome, whereas the selected U.S. texts foreground the circulation and strategic framing of the metaphor, although the Newsweek report also reproduces its object-level socioeconomic meaning. The study describes this contrast as asymmetric meta-discursive competition while treating it strictly as a bounded case study rather than evidence of stable differences between the broader Chinese and U.S. media landscapes. It also proposes vernacular metaphor capture to describe how a bottom-up gaming expression is recontextualized in institutional discourse. The findings illustrate how metaphor selection can organize competing interpretations of the same transnational discursive event.