Tag Archives: lying flat

The growing discontent of China’s workers

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When internet influencer Hasan Piker returned from a recent trip to China, he described it as a workers’ paradise, and praised the country’s “abundance style consumption paired up with a centrally controlled economy.”

Piker should have spent more time talking to workers like Hu AnYan, author of the 2023 bestseller I deliver parcels in Beijing which has sold over 2 million copies in China.  It tells the story of how Hu made a living in more than six cities, holding 19 different jobs over 20 years.  He was a bus driver in Guangzhou, a waiter in Nanning, a security guard in Dali, and a bicycle salesman in Shanghai.

In many of these positions, Hu had a “996” work week, from 9 AM to 9 PM six days a week.  That’s 72 hours per week, sometimes plus overtime.  Technically the 996 work week was outlawed in 2021, “after a 22-year-old woman at e-commerce firm Pingduoduo reportedly collapsed to her death on her way home from work past midnight.”  However there is little reinforcement of labor laws in China, and for many 996 is still a fact of life.

Hu’s book describes the details and concluded that a “work environment like that squeezes all life from a person. You wind up emotionally overdrawn, and numb and indifferent… my work situation [changed] me, little by little, making me irritable, prone to anger, [and] unconcerned by my responsibilities.”

Hu is not the only one to feel this way.  According to a recent marketing company survey “the China Dream has stalled and no one knows what to do about it… young people inherited great expectations from China’s phenomenal economic rise, which began to slow in the 2010s, and from the democratization of China’s higher educational system…This ringing success has fallen flat because the job market has not kept up with university expansion…This appears to be where China is now: school is a marathon, but nobody wins.”

A few years ago, the word involution – neijuan in Mandarin- began trending online in China to refer to the unrelenting competitive pressure faced by young people and the difficulty of getting ahead.  Since then the word “has become shorthand in China for the exhausting… often futile and sometimes self-destructive grind of hyper-competition…  It’s a race to the bottom.”

A Tsinghua University student works on a laptop perched on the handlebars of his bike. This photo went viral in China in 2020, around the time people started talking about overwork and involution.

One key cause is the central government’s “survival of the fittest approach” to dominating technical industries.  For example, when China decided to lead the world in solar panels, the government paid for it.  Three time Pulitzer prize winner Thomas Friedman described how this plays out in a recent podcast:  “Every major city in China decides they need a solar panel factory, and the local government subsidizes it. [Suppose they finance]… 75 solar panel companies.  They compete like crazy against each other… and the Chinese government, absorbs a huge amount of waste, failure and graft.  [Maybe] five of the companies survive. But those five are so fit that they can then go global at a price and level of innovation that is very hard for a foreign competitor to deal with.”

And even the winners are hurt in the long run since “Excessive competition has led to shrinking corporate profit margins across multiple sectors, including electric vehicles (EVs), solar panels, lithium batteries, steel, cement and food delivery… For example, according to one study of 33 automakers headquartered in China, the sector’s median net profit margin fell to just 0.83% in 2024 from 2.7% in 2019.” 

“This [survival of the fittest policy]… results in misallocation of capital, reducing productivity growth and ultimately slowing GDP growth. By destroying profit margins for even the best-run Chinese companies, involution damages their ability to invest for the future.”

The government is also “keeping wages suppressed.”   In addition, “excessive corporate competition from involution contributes to China’s overwork problem, because it gives companies an incentive to work their employees to the bone in order to get a competitive edge.”

This is particularly troubling for workers who lived through China’s economic miracles.  “For the last four decades, China’s economy experienced perhaps the most extraordinary growth period in human history. In 1981, over 90 percent of China’s population lived in poverty as severe as in the world’s least developed regions. Today, over half the population is middle class, with a standard of living comparable to that of many developed nations. Yet in some ways, middle-class Chinese have never felt poorer. The sense of lagging behind their peers’ quality of life has increased, and opportunities for their children to achieve wealth and study abroad seem more out of reach.”

“Many now feel the very state policies that have made China appear strong overseas are hurting them. They see a government more concerned with building global influence and dominating export markets than in addressing the challenges of their households…These days, there is a sense of bitter anger among the people at being the voiceless victims of the state’s obsession with world power and beating the United States…”

In 2021, I wrote a post about one reaction to these challenges, the social movement that became known as “lying flat.”  The term was invented by a dropout named Luo Huazhong, who wrote a blog describing his “low-desire, zero-pressure lifestyle without stable employment, while staying with his parents in Zhejiang province.” 

Luo’s posts spread like wildfire, until censors intervened and “the original post on ‘lying flat’ suddenly disappeared. The search function for ‘lying flat’ on WeChat, where the word had still been trending, was disabled. On the Douban social networking service, a ‘lying flat’ discussion group was also shut down.”

Popular lying flat T-shirts — with slogans like “Don’t buy property; don’t buy a car; don’t get married; don’t have children; and don’t consume” – disappeared from online stores.

Despite the “Party’s high-minded calls for ‘continued struggle’” and censors’ efforts, the term continued to grow in popularity as “a response to the exhausting frenzy of China’s work life—particularly in the big cities.  Lying flat means keeping low, protecting yourself, lowering your expectations, staying out of the way…  The idea behind lying flat is that you can’t win; even with all your overtime and your scrimping and saving, you are still exhausted and running in place.”

Over the last few years, the term has evolved “from a protest to a proactive lifestyle choice [and] one of the most significant social trends in modern China. It signals a generational break from the singular, state-promoted definition of success… China’s youth are… using their education, digital tools, and economic privilege to architect lives of meaning on their own terms. Their silent exodus is creating new cultural hubs, empowering a new generation of artisans, and fundamentally altering the consumer map.”

“A growing cohort of highly educated, urban millennials and Gen Zers are actively engineering an exodus from the pressure cookers of Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen, seeking a new definition of success in China’s so-called ‘slow life’ cities… Cities like Dali in Yunnan, Chengdu in Sichuan, and Xiamen in Fujian have become magnets for this new wave of migrants. Their appeal is a carefully balanced equation: they offer vibrant cultural scenes, natural beauty, and a slower pace of life while still maintaining the connectivity and modern amenities necessary for a professional life…More importantly, they offer more reasonable living costs.”

To sum it up, “it seems as if Chinese people — especially young people — are stuck on a treadmill. China’s young people are studying hard, getting a college education, and putting in grueling long work hours. And yet youth unemployment rates are rising relentlessly, many college graduates can’t find the kind of white-collar work they trained for, and wage growth is sluggish.”

Of course, China is not the only country where people feel stressed and overworked.  For example, “despite prosperity in nearby South Korea, young people there are known as the seven-give-up generation, believing they will never find love, marriage, childbirth, human relations, homeownership, personal dreams [or] hope.” But that’s another story.

China’s campaigns against laziness and video games

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Is it possible to enforce guidelines against laziness?  If anybody can do it, China can.

“A happy life is earned through struggle, and common prosperity requires industriousness,” Chinese leader Xi Jinping said in an August speech about his “common prosperity” initiative (also discussed in my previous post.)  “We must resolutely prevent [ourselves] from falling into the trap of nurturing lazy people through ‘welfarism.’  We must… encourage industriousness and innovation as means to prosperity… with participation from everyone, and avoid… ‘lying flat.’”

The phrase “lying flat” first became popular in China last April after 31 year old LuoHuazhong published a social media post explaining “I have not been working for two years, just having fun and don’t see anything wrong in it… I [just] feel that many things are not worthy of my attention and energy… Do we have to work 12 hours a day in a sweatshop?”  Luo had previously held several jobs since dropping out of vocational high school, such as working 12 hours a day in a tire factory.  Then, he decided he preferred “doing nothing. He quit his job… biked 1,300 miles from Sichuan Province to [his home in] Tibet and decided he could get by on odd jobs and $60 a month from his savings. He called his new lifestyle ‘lying flat.’”

The phrase does not imply lying in bed all day every day, but is instead a state of mind of doing the bare minimum needed to get by.  Luo now eats just two meals a day – mostly noodles, rice, and eggs – and spends about 200 yuan ($31) per month on his minimalist lifestyle.  He supplements his income with occasional part-time jobs, including one assignment at a film studio “that he considered perfect – acting as a dead body in movies.”  Luo spends most of his time reading news and philosophy, and working out, and lives at home sponging off his parents. 

China’s lying flat (tang ping) movement produced many internet memes, including this one which was posted by a cat lover with the caption was “Finally, a social movement I can get behind.”

Government censors did not like the sound of this, and Luo’s original post was soon “scrubbed from the internet. However, copies quickly spread online, sparking lively discussions and videos – many of which garnered millions of views each… they, too, have since been deleted.” 

Despite the censors’ efforts, the concept spread like wildfire, and led to a national “lying flat” movement, complete with T-shirts that say things like “Do nothing lie flat youth,” and “Don’t buy property; don’t buy a car; don’t get married; don’t have children; and don’t consume.”

This concept fell on fertile ground in a country where many Chinese have to work a “996” schedule – from 9 AM to 9 PM six days a week.  But the payoff for all that work can be hard to see since, as David Bandurski, Co-Director of the China Media Project at Brookings put it in one of the best overviews of this movement, “skyrocketing living costs in China’s cities have meant that many young Chinese, even with elite college degrees, find it difficult to cover the basics, much less afford a life of conspicuous consumption.” 

The result, according to Bandurski, is that many workers are beginning to “balk at the Party’s high-minded calls for ‘continued struggle.’” Some observers interpret the movement as “a manifesto against materialism, some suspect it is simply being lazy, and others say this type of defeatist attitude is an inevitable result when people become so overwhelmed and dismayed by the notion of working themselves to the bone that they feel there is no other option but to give up.”

Whatever the interpretation, Communist leadership sees the movement as threatening the economy in two ways.  First, it reduces production by reducing hours worked.  Second, when practitioners spend less, it reduces the consumption which is expected to drive future growth.

Lying flat is just one of the many lifestyle patterns that China hopes to change through its loosely defined common prosperity initiative.   Of all the crackdowns to bring behavior into line with socialist values, the one which is likely to be least popular among teenagers is a new limit of three hours per week on playing video games.  And, oh yeah, the three hours per week must be between 8 and 9 PM on Friday, Saturday and Sunday.  (By comparison, last year the average US teenage boy spent about 21 hours per week playing video games.)

A few weeks before these new rules were announced, a state-run publication compared “video games to ‘electronic drugs’ and ‘spiritual opium,’ eliciting memories of the 1800’s, when millions of Chinese became addicted to smoking opium during the country’s Opium Wars with the United Kingdom.”

According to a New York Times article: “As a more paternalistic government under the Chinese leader Xi Jinping has turned to direct interventions to mold how people live and what they do for fun, gaining control over video games has been high on the priority list… Mr. Xi’s government has increasingly deemed games a superfluous distraction at best — and at worst, a societal ill that threatens the cultural and moral guidance of the Chinese Communist Party.”

The concept of limiting video game playing is not new, but the 2021 total of 3 hours per week represents almost an 80% reduction from the previous Chinese regulation, which limited children to about 14 hours of video games per week (three hours per day on weekends and 1.5 hours on weekdays). 

How could such draconian regulations be enforced?  In China, when people “sign into a game [they must] first provide a mobile phone number, state-issued ID, or even undergo a facial scan.” 

But since we are talking about teenagers, some have already found their way around the bans.  When one Chinese newspaper conducted a survey of parents a month after the new rules went into effect, one reported that his son replaced one bad habit with another, and is now “obsessed with watching others playing video games on streaming services.”  Another parent reported that her son had supplemented gaming with a new internet hobby: “he got hooked on short-video platforms instead, spending hours a day browsing clips and creating content himself.”

Still other teens borrowed a phone from a parent or grandparent.  And some entrepreneurial adults even began placing ads on ecommerce sites to rent their gaming accounts.  “By paying as little as 33 yuan ($5), under-18s could borrow gaming accounts from adult vendors for two hours of use.”

Despite pushback from the public on these and related crackdowns, there is every reason to expect more pressure like this in the future.  As Xi Jinping summed it up in his August speech:  “In our efforts to seek happiness for the people and continuously consolidate the Party’s foundation for holding power over the long term, we shall focus on driving common prosperity for all.” (Italics added for emphasis.)

But what if these two goals – happiness for the people and CPC power – find themselves in conflict?  The Party may find the situation unusually hard to control.  As an article in Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post put it, “quelling protests in the streets is one thing, but getting millions of individuals out of their beds and forcing them to engage in society is entirely different.”