Five years ago, Luo Huazhong discovered that he enjoyed doing nothing. He quit his job as a factory worker in China, biked 1,300 miles from Sichuan province to Tibet and decided he could get by on odd jobs and $60 a month from his savings. He called his new lifestyle “lying flat.”
“I have been chilling,” Luo, 31, wrote in a blog post in April, describing his way of life.
He titled his post “Lying Flat Is Justice.” Before long, the post was being celebrated by Chinese millennials as an anti-consumerist manifesto. “Lying flat” went viral and has since become a broader statement about Chinese society.
A generation ago, the route to success in China was to work hard, get married and have children. The country’s authoritarianism was seen as a fair trade-off as millions were lifted out of poverty. But with employees working longer hours and housing prices rising faster than incomes, many young Chinese fear they will be the first generation not to do better than their parents.
They are now defying the country’s long-held prosperity narrative by refusing to participate in it.
Luo’s blog post was removed by censors, who saw it as affront to Beijing’s economic ambitions. Mentions of “lying flat” — tangping, as it is known in Mandarin — are heavily restricted on the Chinese internet. An official counternarrative has also emerged, encouraging young people to work hard for the sake of the country’s future.
To lie flat means to forgo marriage, not have children, stay unemployed and eschew material wants such as a house or a car. It is the opposite of what China’s leaders have asked of their people.
While plenty of Chinese millennials continue to adhere to the country’s traditional work ethic, “lying flat” reflects both a nascent counterculture movement and a backlash against China’s hypercompetitive work environment.
The ruling Communist Party, wary of any form of social instability, has targeted the “lying flat” idea as a threat to stability in China. Censors have deleted a tangping group with more than 9,000 members on Douban, a popular internet forum. Authorities also barred posts on another tangping forum with more than 200,000 members.
In May, China’s internet regulator ordered online platforms to “strictly restrict” new posts on tangping. A second directive required e-commerce platforms to stop selling clothes, phone cases and other merchandise branded with “tangping.”
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