Is Lying Flat a Foreign Plot? 🛌 | Following the Yuan
A recently published piece from China's Ministry of State Security revived the conversations and debates about 'lying flat' among the youth.
Editor’s note from Yaling: I’ve been working with Rongrong since we met at Sixth Tone. Born and raised in China, she earned her Bachelor’s degree there in 2022, before China reopened its borders due to COVID. In this piece, she observes what ‘lying flat/tangping’ means for her generation after the concept was elevated to a national security issue.
I moved to Tokyo for grad school after 2022 and now work as a freelance writer and designer. Over the last few years, I’ve watched friends and acquaintances back home get caught between “trying harder” and “lying flat” amid an increasingly competitive job market, even as opportunities have shrunk.
The last time I visited a friend in a new first-tier city, she was busy preparing for the guokao (国考), China’s national civil service exam.
When I asked why, she said it was her parents’ wish. Like many Chinese parents, they believed that a stable job was the only real job. She had been dead set against it at first.
After she started her first tiresome full-time job, she gradually realized she’d rather be a civil servant to lie flat (tangping, 躺平). After all, it comes with fixed hours and generous benefits for the rest of her life.
In order to lie flat later, she decides to do the exact opposite now:
She wakes up at 7 every morning, grabs some bread, and rushes off to her day job at a private company. After a full day of work, she returns home and studies for the exam, memorizing dense political terminology, prepping for interviews, drilling past questions compiled by other test-takers online. She is often too anxious to fall asleep at night.
She hadn’t even worked this hard for the gaokao (高考), China’s notoriously competitive college entrance exam. ‘Was it really worth pouring in this much effort, this much energy?’ I wanted to ask but didn’t dare to. I wished her the best.
On April 28, China’s Ministry of State Security published an article claiming that “lying flat” is being stoked by hostile foreign forces:
Numerous cases suggest that anti-China hostile forces, under the banner of “lying flat,” are actively attempting to erode the thinking of Chinese youth.
I wonder how my friend would react to it. If her goal is to lie flat inside the civil service system, does that make her “a victim of foreign subversion,” or its most dedicated opponent?
What follows is my attempt to think through that question: where this word came from, who has been fighting over what it means, what young people are actually doing, and how ordinary people responded when the state security apparatus tried to claim that their exhaustion was, in fact, a foreign plot?
