Recently, in discussions about American society, a frequently mentioned phenomenon is the so-called “Cutoff Line."(Dead Line) Many people tend to attribute this issue to insufficient welfare, ruthless capitalism, or governance failures. However, focusing solely on the surface level of the system often overlooks a deeper factor: the choice inherent in legal culture itself. In fact, different societies have different answers to questions like “Who should bear the consequences of failure?” and “Should the state intervene in advance?” It is in this sense that revisiting the governance logic in traditional Chinese legal culture may provide a neglected comparative perspective for understanding America’s “cutoff line” phenomenon.

How Did Traditional Chinese Law Deal with “Losers”?

“No distinction between civil and criminal law” and “integration of all laws” are often regarded as important characteristics of ancient Chinese legal culture. However, this generalization is more of an ex post facto attribution. It was only after the Western bourgeois revolution, with the differentiation of civil law, criminal law, administrative law, and other branches of law, that modern Chinese jurisprudence gradually summarized and abstracted this concept when comparing Western legal structures.

In ancient China, failure to repay debts was not merely a “civil issue” but was explicitly incorporated into the state’s governance as a disorderly behavior. Taking the Tang Code as an example, it had clear and direct provisions for debt default: debtors who refused to repay without justifiable reasons could be punished with flogging or caning. At the same time, by establishing a “prohibition on excessive interest,” it explicitly limited the total interest to not exceed the principal and required guarantors to bear joint liability for repayment. This meant that the state did not merely stand on the side of creditors to ensure transactional order but attempted to prevent debt relationships from evolving into long-term social instability through deterrence by punishment, interest restrictions, and joint liability.

By the Ming Dynasty, the Great Ming Code further refined this approach in its Household Law section, specifically including a “prohibition on illegal interest” clause that explicitly capped monthly interest at three percent. It also emphasized preserving the debtor’s basic means of livelihood during debt enforcement, prohibiting the complete severance of their livelihood due to debt repayment. In other words, the governance logic of ancient China was not simply “harsh laws and severe punishments.” Instead, while imposing direct penalties for breaches of contract, it actively intervened in setting the boundaries of debt relationships to prevent individuals from falling into a complete survival crisis. The so-called “father’s debts, son’s repayment” was, to a large extent, an institutional arrangement that spread risks in advance at the family level.

In this sense, ancient China did not have a “cutoff line” in the later sense. When individuals fell into distress due to debt, the state did not choose to withdraw completely. Instead, through the intertwined use of punishment, administrative measures, and ethical norms, it compressed the consequences of failure within a controllable range. This model forms a structural contrast with modern America, which strictly separates civil and criminal matters, refuses state punishment, and outsources extreme consequences entirely to society and the market.

Has Modern China Truly Bid Farewell to “Integration of All Laws”?

In the legal transformation since modern times, the tradition of “integration of all laws” has been systematically negated. The late Qing legal reforms, Republican-era legislation, and the establishment of a departmental legal system after the founding of New China all aimed at “clear distinctions” and “well-defined boundaries,” hoping to break away from the governance style of traditional society where “everything could be regulated, and everything was mixed together.” At least formally, modern China has established a complete departmental legal system.

Interestingly, however, if we return to everyday language, we can still find some thought-provoking details. For example, we often say, “You have violated the law” or “This is illegal behavior,” but few people ask whether it violates civil law, criminal law, or administrative law, or which specific legal provision it breaches. In most contexts, “illegal” resembles an overall negative evaluation rather than a strict judgment based on departmental law.

This linguistic habit is not accidental. Behind it lies a legal cultural intuition that has persisted for over two thousand years: law is first and foremost a tool for maintaining order, not a set of finely segmented techniques.

For this reason, the phenomenon of “no distinction between civil and criminal law” and “mixed use of all laws” is not entirely without social foundation in reality. Although the boundaries between departmental laws have been clearly delineated in an academic sense, and legal research has become highly specialized—with scholars accustomed to “sticking to their own turf,” treating civil law, criminal law, and administrative law as mutually exclusive professional domains—in official contexts, issues such as “two-way linkage between administrative and criminal enforcement” and “intersection of civil and criminal matters” are precisely the subjects of repeated emphasis and focused study. This phenomenon itself indicates that the logic of real-world governance does not operate entirely according to the academic division of departmental laws.

Recently, while attending Luo Xiang’s lecture in person ( What I Listen for When Attending Luo Xiang’s University Lecture in Person ), I had a very intuitive sense of this point. Scholars like Luo Xiang, who specialize in criminal law, often self-deprecatingly say in their lectures, “I am legally illiterate” or “We are all legally illiterate.” The root of this is not a lack of personal ability but the high degree of fragmentation in the contemporary legal system: the prerequisites for establishing many criminal offenses are not directly written in criminal law provisions but are scattered across administrative regulations, industry norms, civil rules, and even technical standards. Why a certain behavior is criminalized, when it is criminalized, and by what standards it is criminalized often cannot be explained self-sufficiently within criminal law alone. Instead, judgments must rely on provisions from other departmental laws. For this reason, even professional criminal law scholars may feel confused when faced with specific behaviors, often having to piece together different normative systems through post-hoc searches to barely reconstruct “why this is a crime.”

From this perspective, the so-called “highly separated departmental laws” are more of an academic ideal. In practical operation, the law still largely follows a result-oriented, order-prioritizing comprehensive governance approach. This approach is not entirely disconnected from the cultural intuition of “integration of all laws” in traditional Chinese legal culture; it has merely adopted a more modern and technical form of expression.

What this reflects is not confusion in legal techniques but a deeper governance logic: when certain civil behaviors are deemed likely to produce serious social consequences, the state does not shy away from intervening in advance through punitive means.

In stark contrast is the path represented by the United States.

Another Kind of “Cruelty” in American Law

In the American legal tradition, the distinction between branches of law is seen as an almost insurmountable red line, particularly evident between civil, administrative, and criminal domains. Failure to repay debts, business failures, and personal bankruptcy are clearly excluded from the penal and administrative enforcement systems. In principle, the state does not directly intervene in personal affairs due to civil failures, let alone design systemic “exit mechanisms” or “paths to recovery” for those who fail. At the level of legal theory, this practice is often interpreted as a profound respect for personal freedom, property rights, and constitutional boundaries.

But the problem is: the state refraining from punishment does not mean the state takes responsibility.

If this logic is contrasted with China’s governance approach, the differences become clearer. In China, even if individuals face relatively severe judicial consequences due to debt issues—including asset disposal, enforcement actions, credit penalties, and even criminal liability in specific circumstances—the state still explicitly acknowledges their right to “continue living.” Even if someone carries debt they could never repay in several lifetimes, after fulfilling the corresponding judicial rulings, they can still work, marry, have children, rent housing, and engage in basic consumption. However, they are clearly and predictably restricted within certain boundaries: they cannot engage in high-consumption activities, frequent high-consumption venues, or undertake economic behaviors significantly mismatched with their ability to fulfill obligations.

The core of this institutional design is not “leniency,” but rather controlling the spillover scope of failure. Failures are punished, but individuals are not wholly excised from the social structure; the consequences are clear, bearable, and, in theory, can gradually be lifted over time. This means that even after suffering major failure, individuals are still regarded as subjects of governance, not as “natural discards” systematically abandoned by the system.

In contrast, in the United States, within a highly marketized, low-safety-net social structure, when individuals fall below the “survival threshold” composed of cash flow, credit history, housing conditions, and medical security, the legal system chooses not to intervene and contain the risk but to withdraw entirely. The so-called “personal bankruptcy system” is also rendered ineffectual by the “execution line.” At this point, the cost of personal failure does not disappear; it is entirely outsourced to the market and social networks, which are themselves highly unstable.

This is precisely the institutional root of the so-called American “execution line” phenomenon: once unemployed, bankrupt, or credit-collapsed, individuals can lose housing, medical security, and social connections almost simultaneously in an extremely short time, rapidly sliding into homelessness. Formally, this is not a legal punishment; but in lived experience, its severity is not only no less than institutionalized sanctions but is even more unpredictable and irreversible.

It is in this sense that the “gentleness” of American law instead constitutes a more brutal outcome-oriented reality: it refuses to take responsibility for punishment but tacitly allows individuals to be structurally cleared from normal social life after failure. This cruelty is not reflected in the statutes but in the void left after the law chooses to withdraw.

The Difference in Legal Culture Is Essentially a Difference in Risk Distribution

If the core issue of traditional Chinese legal culture lies in “how to prevent disorder,” what American legal culture truly insists on is “to what extent state power should not intervene.” This insistence is often packaged, at the legal theory level, as a high degree of respect for individual freedom and constitutional boundaries. However, in practical operation, it comes at an extremely high social cost.

The so-called “cutoff line” is a concentrated manifestation of this institutional choice.

In terms of outcomes, this model has not produced a more efficient or dignified social order. On the contrary, in major metropolitan areas like New York, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia, the large number of long-term homeless individuals lingering in public spaces in a state akin to “the walking dead” itself indicates the systemic failure of this system in risk control and social integration.

More alarmingly, this failure is often obscured by Western discourse: the state has not “punished” anyone, so it seems it need not take responsibility for the outcomes. In reality, however, the survival blow suffered by those rapidly stripped of housing, medical care, and social relationships is no less severe than institutionalized punishment. The only difference is that this punishment no longer appears in the name of the law but is quietly legitimized as “market choice” or “personal failure.”

Therefore, America’s “cutoff line” problem is not some unavoidable cost of modernity but an institutional outcome that can be clearly evaluated as a governance failure. What it upholds is the formal boundary of so-called state power not overstepping its bounds; what it abandons is the substantive guarantee of overall social stability and the minimum survival dignity of individuals.

In this sense, the difference between Chinese and American legal cultures is not simply a debate between “freedom and order” but a distinction between the merits of two risk distribution schemes: one chooses to have the state intervene in advance to compress the scope of extreme failure; the other chooses to let individuals bear systemic risks alone and collectively turn a blind eye after failure occurs. At least from the contemporary American reality, the latter can hardly be regarded as a successful governance model.