Beijing, May 4 China’s “lying flat" movement, which emerged around 2021 as a rejection of societal pressures and hyper-competitive work cultures among Chinese youth, has drawn wider concerns among the authorities. Rather than confronting the regime, it reflects disengagement over resistance, a report said on Monday.
According to a report in ‘The Diplomat', China’s Ministry of State Security posted a video on its social media platform on April 28, describing "lying flat" (tangping) as an attempt by hostile foreign forces to poison and ideologically influence Chinese youth. The report questioned how a lifestyle choice could be framed as a national security issue.
“The mainstream analysis takes ‘lying flat’ as an economic phenomenon rooted in the assumption that economic performance is the core of Chinese legitimacy. Of course, youth unemployment, unaffordable house prices, '996', ‘flowing downward', etc., are real problems that have caused the desperation of the youth. However, the economic perspective can only be used to analyse the civilians’ decision. It cannot answer why the Chinese government needed to use the state security apparatus to address a labour market issue,” the report detailed.
“Another potential explanation is that Chinese bureaucrats tend to externalise domestic issues, so it is just the same old playbook. But it still cannot explain why the Ministry of State Security – not the Ministry of Human Resources or the Communist Youth League – was the one responding,” it added.
The report stressed that for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), “lying flat” is not merely an economic problem but an existential challenge to its governing logic.
Chinese President Xi in 2019 warned that most of the cadres “always hope everything will be peaceful and calm" and have “more than enough desire for stability, but not enough spirit of struggle". Seven years later, the Ministry of State Security has extended the same critique to an entire generation of Chinese youth.
The report argues that the prevailing view- that Chinese political legitimacy derives from economic performance – is an assumption which is not wrong but incomplete. It added that since the Chinese regime depends on “emotional mobilisation" rather than “economic output”, the key indicator is “not only the wallets of the people, but also the sentiments of ‘struggling’ among them.” As official rhetoric increasingly uses the term "struggle", young people coin new phrases to reject it.
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