Fascinating: A new movement may be sweeping thru China: "Lying flat"
This post is long, but it could be a huge deal.
It's (extensively) edited from a 22-minute video apparently narrated by a young Chinese male. As with all stories about China, viewers/readers are advised to be skeptical, as the CCP are masters at putting out propaganda to lull the west--and there's no question that this story is reassuring to western viewers.
It describes what the narrator claims is a rapidly spreading movement among young, educated Chinese who have concluded that Chinese system--imposed by the CCP--is rigged against them. They've noted that the only young people who are living well in China are the children of either communist-party elites or successful businessmen--the "connected."
By contrast, for hard-working children of un-connected parents, urban life is so expensive that they despair of ever owning a home (for example).
Watching the video I was struck by the stunning parallels to life for millions of young Americans. Democrat politicians in big cities keep increasing their taxes, the big Dem-ruled cities remain crime-ridden and dangerous, and many young Americans seem resigned to a certainty that nothing will ever get better, because the System is simply too corrupt. As you read the transcript, whenever you see "China," substitute "America" and see if it rings any bells. And with that preamble...
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Something is spreading across China that the Communist Party never expected: Not a virus or protest or a political movement with leaders that the security apparatus can identify and arrest, but something quieter--something moving through Chinese society like water, finding every gap, every space where control doesn't quite reach.
And despite all the surveillance cameras and internet filters and neighborhood committees and the Party's vast, sophisticated apparatus of social control, it's already spread through 100 million private conversations. And the CCP has no idea how to stop it--because to their surprise, you can't arrest an idea.
It's the decision made by millions of ordinary Chinese people to just stop trying--to stop chasing dreams the System has made impossible for ordinary citizens.
This movement has several names, because it's emerged almost simultaneously in different communities, each expressing the same idea in slightly different language. It describes a truth everyone in China recognizes. And since there are no leaders the Party can arrest, the CCP doesn't know how to counter it.
The word that started it all is "tangping," which is Mandarin for "lying flat"--someone who has
stopped moving. It's a symbol for stopping one's participation in the exhausting, all-consuming effort Chinese society has demanded of its young people for decades.
It started in 2021 when a young man posted an essay explaining his decision to stop working beyond the minimum necessary to survive. No more career ambitions, no dreams of marriage or children or owning a home. No consumption beyond basic needs. All dreams redirected toward internal peace.
The post went viral with a speed that shocked everyone. Within days it had been shared millions of times. Within weeks it had generated a nationwide conversation.
The Communist Party deleted any social media posts containing telltale phrases, and state media posted articles condemning it. The Party directed officials to lecture young people about the importance of continuing to work hard for the good of the nation.
But hundreds of millions of young Chinese already knew what the poster said was true. And once the idea was uttered, the censors couldn't delete all the posts.
Equally crucially, the CCP couldn't change the reality that made the idea resonate so strongly with tens of millions of ordinary citizens.
To understand what's driving this movement you need to understand what life is actually like for a young person today. A typical 26-year-old university graduate in a second-tier city, with a degree that cost his or her family everything, is competing for jobs that don't pay enough to cover rent. The young person sees housing prices that have risen so far that home ownership has become impossible for young people who aren't "connected."
The numbers are staggering: In 2023 "youth unemployment" ["youth" isn't defined] in China hit a record high of over 21%--at which point, in a reaction typical of all totalitarian regimes--the CCP simply stopped publishing the data.
[Does that ring any bells, reader? Crime stats? The number of Americans killed or inflicted with crippling injuries by the bribem-mandated clot shot? Mayorkas bleating that "The border is totally secure" while admitting 10,000 illegals a DAY? It's classic, universal in dictatorships.]
As with all dictatorships, when statistics become embarrassing, the rulers just stop publishing them.
But obviously the young people whose lack of a job the statistics were measuring didn't disappear. Hundreds of millions are still there, educated, digitally connected, globally aware, and acutely conscious of the gap between what the Party promised and what it's actually delivered.
China's education system spent decades telling students that if they studied hard enough,
competed hard enough, sacrificed enough of their childhoods to the brutal examination system, they'd be rewarded with a prosperous career.
So as anyone could have predicted, their hard-working parents poured everything into those goals, working themselves to exhaustion to get their children the golden degree. Grandparents gave their life savings. Children gave up play, sleep, and childhood itself in pursuit of the educational credentials the Party assured them were the ticket to a great future.
And indeed, the young became fabulously educated. In every global academic competition, Chinese students ran rings around the average western college grad.
[Here in the States the Democrat party simply offered everyone student loans. And studying hard wasn't required--students were encouraged to get degrees in "African studies" and "women's studies." But the result was much the same: graduates unable to find good jobs. In the U.S. it was because the degrees were in useless fields. In China--with 1.4 billion people--it was because there were 100 brilliant PhD applicants for every good job. Any more bells ringing yet?]
But then graduates discovered those credentials weren't enough--because now that so many millions had them, the economy hadn't created enough high-quality jobs to absorb them all.
And there was another problem, because while the Party had promised a meritocracy, the system actually produced something very different: the best jobs somehow went to children with the right family connections, relationships with the right officials. [Ringing any more bells yet?]
"Lying flat" was the spark. After that came "bai lan"--Mandarin for "let it rot." If lying flat was passive withdrawal, "let it rot" is more pointed in its rejection. It implies that the system itself is corrupt--a lie at its core.
Young people concluded that the appropriate response to a rigged game is not to play harder, but to refuse to play.
The idea spread through the youth culture with a speed that alarmed CCP officials. Like "lying flat" earlier, it appeared in memes and social media posts before the censors realized what it meant. Young people chatted about no longer pretending to care about a system they no longer believed in. Young professionals spoke of working at jobs they hated, of doing the minimum required to not be fired--not because they were lazy but because they finally realized that in a system where advancement depended on connections and family, working harder was pointless.
Young people described choosing not to buy something because consumption felt like
cooperation with a system that consistently lied to them.
Finally came the most telling expression of this movement: fed-up young people have begun leaving big cities and returning to their villages because urban life has become so expensive--and so relentlessly consuming of time, energy and mental health.
They're documenting this return on social media, and getting tens of millions of views before CCP officials order the censors to delete the posts. Since the content isn't overtly political and doesn't criticize the Party by name, the rulers didn't realize the idea was spreading until too late.
When skilled, university-educated young people voluntarily choose to live in the relative poverty of small villages over the excitement of city life, they're making a statement that might give the CCP pause.
[Just kidding: like U.S. Democrat leaders, the CCP rulers never worry: they're always absolutely sure that whatever they're doing must be perfect.]
If any member of the CCP understands the message of young people leaving the big cities, it scarcely matters because the Party is clearly unable to change the conditions driving the movement.
The "lying flat" movement shows that millions of young Chinese have decided striving is pointless. That the upward mobility the party promised is only available to children of connected families.
This is a legitimacy crisis--not the kind that comes with tanks in the street and protesters chanting for democracy, but the kind that comes when millions of young people stop believing, stop pretending that hard work ensures success when the evidence of their daily lives tells them it doesn't.
The Party doesn't know how to respond to this because there's no protest to disperse, no leader to arrest. No organization to infiltrate and prosecute.
The economic implications for the CCP are enormous. For 60 years or so, China's growth has depended on 1) a large, young, hardworking population willing to accept wages and working conditions workers in other countries would reject. 2) high savings to provide the capital for
investment; and 3) consumption growth, driven by a middle class that believed its future would be better. All three factors are now in doubt.
Another huge factor is that more young Chinese are deciding not to have children, possibly because of the high cost, but also due to the same fundamental disillusionment. The population of China has actually dropped for the last four years--only by a tiny percentage, but still....And as in all countries committed to supporting retirees, a drop in population forecasts hard times. [Bells, anyone?]
The huge population growth that powered China's economic miracle for years has stopped.
And the generation that should be forming families, having children, buying homes and driving consumption has decided--in enormous and growing numbers--that under communism, a family is a liability.
[The narrator claims "This is not a problem that can be solved with a stimulus package or a new 5-year plan. This is a structural crisis rooted in a fundamental disconnect between what the system promised and what it delivers." I think that's naive: all the Party needs to do is give people a modest payment for each child, for, say, five years. Democrats in the U.S. who rigged the welfare system to reward single mothers found that millions of girls started having more kids.]
[I assume all Americans know that the "total fertility rate" for white American women (less than 1.4) has been far below the replacement rate (2.05 or so) for over 15 years, right? Ahh, y'say you didn't know that? I'm...shocked. Not.]
Beijing's response to "lying flat" has been the only kind it knows: censor any posts discussing it, condemn the movement as "counter-revolutionary," order officials to promote the virtues of hard work and roll out more propaganda campaigns touting the wonders of communism.
So social media posts are scanned for banned phrases, and any detected are deleted. Of course none of that changes the lived reality that triggered the movement. Every young person who saw CCP propaganda urging hard work and sacrifice looked at their own life and saw the gap between the propaganda and the reality with perfect clarity.
So finally Beijing tried a different approach. Officials began to admit that young people faced real challenges, and announced New Policies to address youth unemployment, build more affordable housing and so on. But as far as can be determined, right now the movement is still spreading.
One problem for the CCP is that the "lying flat" generation is the most educated in Chinese history. University enrollment rates--in single digits for their grandparents generation--are now nearly universal for urban young people.
They've grown up with smartphones and at least some internet access, thus have been exposed to the full range of human possibility. They have higher expectations, so their disappointment is more acute.
Education was always touted as the great equalizer. Instead, [as in the U.S.] the costs
keep rising and the returns keep falling. A generation that was repeatedly assured that
education was the key to success has discovered that most high-paying jobs are given to children of Party members.
The CCP's control mechanisms were built for an era of top-down information flow where controlling the broadcast meant controlling the message. But with the internet, even one as heavily censored as China's, information can be shared horizontally at a speed censors can't totally stop.
And the party knows it. Internal CCP documents show the Party is concerned about the spread of what officials call "nihilistic thought" among Chinese youth.
The CCP's power rests not just on coercion, but on a Narrative of China rising--the narrative that if people are willing to sacrifice and unite under the Party's leadership, China will rule the world--a role the Party tells them is theirs by right, but has so far been denied to them.
When young people take up lying flat they're rejecting that narrative. That rejection tells the CCP that they don't believe the story the party is telling about China's future, and that they're no longer willing to sacrifice for the Party's Narrative. That's the most serious threat the movement poses.
Source:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WToi9eLNXFM
