Won t Happen Again for 36 996 Years
These Chinese Millennials Are 'Chilling,' and Beijing Isn't Happy
Young people in China have set off a nascent counterculture movement that involves lying downwards and doing every bit fiddling as possible.
V 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 $lx a calendar month from his savings. He chosen his new lifestyle "lying flat."
"I have been spooky," Mr. Luo, 31, wrote in a weblog postal service in Apr, describing his manner of life. "I don't feel like there's annihilation incorrect."
He titled his post "Lying Flat Is Justice," attaching a photo of himself lying on his bed in a dark room with the curtains drawn. Before long, the post was being celebrated by Chinese millennials as an anti-consumerist manifesto. "Lying apartment" went viral and has since go a broader statement about Chinese society.
A generation agone, the road to success in People's republic of china was to piece of work hard, get married and take children. The country's authoritarianism was seen as a off-white trade-off as millions were lifted out of poverty. But with employees working longer hours and housing prices rising faster than incomes, many immature Chinese fear they will be the kickoff generation not to exercise better than their parents.
They are at present defying the country's long-held prosperity narrative by refusing to participate in it.
Mr. Luo's blog mail service was removed by censors, who saw it as an affront to Beijing's economical ambitions. Mentions of "lying flat" — tangping, as information technology's known in Mandarin — are heavily restricted on the Chinese net. An official counternarrative has as well emerged, encouraging young people to work hard for the sake of the country's time to come.
"After working for so long, I just felt numb, like a machine," Mr. Luo said in an interview. "And and so I resigned."
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To lie flat means to forgo marriage, not have children, stay unemployed and eschew cloth wants such as a house or a automobile. It is the opposite of what Mainland china'due south leaders have asked of their people. But that didn't bother Leon Ding.
Mr. Ding, 22, has been lying flat for virtually three months and thinks of the act every bit "silent resistance." He dropped out of a academy in his final twelvemonth in March because he didn't similar the computer science major his parents had chosen for him.
Afterwards leaving school, Mr. Ding used his savings to rent a room in Shenzhen. He tried to find a regular office chore simply realized that most positions required him to work long hours. "I want a stable job that allows me to accept my own time to relax, simply where tin I notice it?" he said.
Mr. Ding thinks young people should work hard for what they beloved, just not "996" — 9 a.grand. to 9 p.yard., half dozen days a week — as many employers in China expect. Frustrated with the job search, he decided that "lying apartment" was the way to go.
"To exist honest, it feels really comfortable," he said. "I don't want to be too hard on myself."
To make ends come across, Mr. Ding gets paid to play video games and has minimized his spending by doing things like cutting out his favorite chimera tea. Asked nearly his long-term plans, he said: "Come dorsum and ask me in six months. I merely plan for half-dozen months."
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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 backfire confronting China's hypercompetitive work surroundings.
Xiang Biao, a professor of social anthropology at Oxford University who focuses on Chinese society, called tangping civilization a turning point for China. "Young people feel a kind of pressure that they cannot explain and they experience that promises were cleaved," he said. "People realize that fabric betterment is no longer the single most important source of meaning in life."
The ruling Communist Political party, wary of whatsoever form of social instability, has targeted the "lying flat" idea equally a threat to stability in People's republic of china. Censors take deleted a tangping group with more 9,000 members on Douban, a pop internet forum. The government also barred posts on another tangping forum with more than than 200,000 members.
In May, Communist china's net regulator ordered online platforms to "strictly restrict" new posts on tangping, according to a directive obtained past The New York Times. A 2d directive required e-commerce platforms to stop selling clothes, phone cases and other merchandise branded with "tangping."
The state news media has called tangping "shameful," and a newspaper warned against "lying flat earlier getting rich." Yu Minhong, a prominent billionaire, urged young people not to lie downwards, considering "otherwise who tin can nosotros rely on for the future of our land?"
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Mr. Luo decided to write about tangping subsequently he saw people heatedly discussing China'due south latest demography results in Apr and calls for the country to accost a looming demographic crisis by having more than babies.
He described his original "lying flat" weblog post as "an inner monologue from a human living at the bottom of the lodge."
"Those people who say lying down is shameful are shameless," he said. "I take the right to choose a slow lifestyle. I didn't practise anything destructive to guild. Exercise we have to piece of work 12 hours a day in a sweatshop, and is that justice?"
Mr. Luo was born in rural Jiande County, in eastern Zhejiang Province. In 2007, he dropped out of a vocational high school and started working in factories. One task involved working 12-hour shifts at a tire factory. Past the cease of the solar day, he had blisters all over his anxiety, he said.
In 2014, he constitute a chore every bit a product inspector in a mill but didn't like information technology. He quit afterwards 2 years and took on the occasional acting gig to make ends come across. (In 2018, he played a corpse in a Chinese moving-picture show by, of course, lying flat.)
Today, he lives with his family and spends his days reading philosophy and news and working out. He said information technology was an platonic lifestyle, allowing him to live minimally and "think and express freely." He encourages his followers, who call him "the Master of Lying Down," to practice the aforementioned.
Paradigm
After hearing about Mr. Luo's tangping postal service on a Chinese podcast, Zhang Xinmin, 36, was inspired to write a vocal nigh it.
Mr. Zhang, a musician based in Wuhan, had quit his job in advertising 5 years ago to pursue his music, and the idea of lying flat resonated with him. He called his song "Tangping Is the Correct Way."
Mr. Zhang uploaded the song to his social media platforms on June 3, and within a mean solar day censors had deleted it from iii websites. He was furious.
"Present, only running forward is allowed, but not lying down," he said. "It doesn't make sense to me that they deleted this song."
He eventually uploaded the song equally a video on YouTube, which is blocked in China. The video shows him lying down on his sofa, casually strumming his guitar as he sings in a breezy vox:
Lying down is really good
Lying down is wonderful
Lying down is the correct thing to do
Lie down then you won't fall anymore
Lying down means never falling down.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/03/world/asia/china-slackers-tangping.html
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