BEIJING– For decades, the unwritten social contract in China was simple, brutal, and highly effective: study endlessly, work punishing hours, do not question the system, and in return, you will get rich. Your life will be better than your parents’ lives. You will buy an apartment, marry, and secure your place in a rising superpower.
Today, for millions of young Chinese adults, that deal is dead.
Faced with a slowing economy, brutal work cultures, and sky-high living costs, a massive portion of China’s youth has decided to simply stop trying. They are choosing to “lie flat” ( tang ping )—a cultural movement that involves doing the bare minimum to survive, rejecting the endless hustle of corporate life, and walking away from the pressures of marriage and homeownership.
But if you ask the authorities in Beijing, this quiet, passive withdrawal is not a reaction to domestic economic failures. Instead, it is a deliberate, manufactured plot. State media and security agencies are increasingly pushing a different narrative: foreign forces, particularly the CIA, are spreading pessimism to break the spirit of China’s youth.
This article breaks down the growing disconnect between the official government narrative and the stark, lived reality of young people in China today. It explores why a generation is giving up , why the government is looking outward for someone to blame, and why this silent rebellion is becoming one of the most sensitive domestic issues for the Chinese Communist Party.
Key Takeaways:
- The Accusation:Chinese authorities are increasingly framing the “lying flat” (tang ping) movement among young people as the result of foreign interference, specifically pointing fingers at the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Western “cognitive warfare.”
- The Reality:Millions of Chinese youth are stepping back from the rat race due to a severely chilled job market, stagnant wages, and the crushing costs of housing and city living.
- The Data Disconnect:After youth unemployment hit a record 21.3% in 2023, the government temporarily stopped publishing the data. When it returned, the numbers were revised down using new methods, but the lived experience on the ground remains grim.
- The Cultural Shift:A generation raised on the promise of relentless economic growth is now embracing “letting it rot” (bailan) as a silent protest against a system they feel is no longer working for them.
Part 1: The Blame Game and the “Foreign Hand”
To understand how a domestic labor trend became a matter of national security, you have to look at the changing messaging from China’s Ministry of State Security (MSS). Traditionally a secretive intelligence agency focused on spies and counter-espionage, the MSS recently stepped into the public spotlight. Using its official WeChat account, the agency has been pushing daily warnings to the Chinese public about hidden threats.
One of their primary targets? “Cognitive warfare.”
According to recent state-aligned narratives, Western intelligence agencies are waging a psychological war against China. The goal, officials suggest, is to spread “negative energy,” amplify economic bad news, and convince young Chinese people that their futures are bleak. By doing so, foreign adversaries hope to sap the nation of its productivity and derail China’s rise on the global stage.
Articles in state-backed media have echoed this sentiment, suggesting that terms like “lying flat” and “letting it rot” ( bailan ) are amplified by hostile foreign forces. The implication is clear: a true patriot works hard; a youth who gives up is falling victim to a Western trap.
But why point the finger at the CIA for a trend born on Chinese internet forums?
Experts suggest it is a classic deflection strategy. Blaming a foreign enemy serves two purposes. First, it delegitimizes the very real complaints of the youth. If your exhaustion is just a “Western mind virus,” then the government doesn’t need to fix the housing market or regulate corporate overtime—it just needs to censor the internet harder. Second, it unites the public against an outside threat, distracting them from the structural problems within the Chinese economy.
You can read more about China’s shift toward national security messaging in daily life via Reuters .
However, when you talk to the young people actually living in cities like Beijing, Shanghai, or Shenzhen, the idea that they are being brainwashed by foreign spies is met with bitter laughter. They aren’t reading CIA propaganda. They are looking at their bank accounts.
Part 2: Decoding “Lying Flat” and “Letting it Rot”
To grasp the scale of the government’s panic, you have to understand the vocabulary of China’s disillusioned youth. The terms they use are highly descriptive, capturing a mood of deep, systemic exhaustion.
What is Tang Ping?
The term tang ping , or “lying flat,” first exploded onto the Chinese internet in 2021. It started with a simple post on a Baidu forum by a former factory worker named Luo Huazhong. He posted a picture of himself literally lying flat in bed, writing about how he had quit his job, moved to a cheaper area, and reduced his living expenses to the absolute minimum. He argued that society’s pressure to work yourself to death for a boss who reaps all the rewards was a scam.
“Since there has never been an ideological trend exalting human subjectivity in our land, I shall create one for myself,” he wrote. “Lying flat is my wise man’s movement.”
The post went viral. It struck an immediate nerve with a generation exhausted by the “involution” ( neijuan ) of Chinese society. Neijuan refers to a state of intense, pointless competition where everyone has to work harder and harder just to stay in the same place. Imagine a movie theater where one person stands up to get a better view. Soon, the people behind them have to stand up. Eventually, everyone in the theater is standing. Nobody has a better view, but everyone is far more uncomfortable. That is Neijuan .
The Evolution: Letting it Rot (Bailan)
If “lying flat” was a peaceful retreat, the newer term, bailan —which translates to “letting it rot”—is a darker, more cynical evolution.
Derived from basketball slang (referring to a team tanking a season because they have no chance of winning), bailan means actively giving up. If you know you are going to fail the test, why study? If you know you can never afford a house, why save money? If you know the job market is broken, why send out resumes?
Young people began posting videos of themselves spending all day in pajamas, eating cheap noodles, and ignoring calls from recruiters. It is a form of silent, unorganized strike action. They cannot protest in the streets—the security state makes that impossible—but they can refuse to participate in the economy. And for a government obsessed with productivity and GDP growth, millions of young people quietly opting out is a terrifying prospect.
Part 3: The Economic Reality Check
The root cause of this movement has nothing to do with foreign interference. It is driven by cold, hard math. The Chinese economy, once an unstoppable engine of double-digit growth, has slowed down significantly.
The Youth Unemployment Crisis
The most glaring symptom of this slowdown is the youth unemployment rate. In the summer of 2023, the official jobless rate for urban youth aged 16 to 24 hit a record high of 21.3%. Let that sink in: more than one in five young people who wanted a job could not find one.
And those were just the official numbers. Some independent economists, such as Zhang Dandan from Peking University, estimated that if you included the young people who had completely given up looking for work (the ones “lying flat”), the true youth unemployment rate might have been closer to 46%.
The government’s response to this alarming data was telling. In August 2023, the National Bureau of Statistics suddenly announced it would stop publishing youth unemployment figures entirely , claiming the methodology needed to be “refined.” When they resumed publishing the data months later with a new counting method (which excluded students entirely), the number magically dropped to around 15%.
But changing the thermometer doesn’t cure the fever.
Too Many Degrees, Too Few Jobs
Part of the problem is a massive mismatch between the education system and the actual economy. For twenty years, Chinese families poured their life savings into education, believing a university degree was a golden ticket. In 2024, nearly 11.8 million students graduated from Chinese universities—a record high.
But the economy is not creating enough high-paying, white-collar jobs to absorb them. The sectors that traditionally hired the most graduates—tech, real estate, and private tutoring—have all been battered by sudden, heavy-handed government crackdowns in recent years.
Instead of sitting in air-conditioned tech offices, many graduates are finding that the only jobs available are in the “gig economy.” Today, social media is flooded with stories of young people holding master’s degrees working as food delivery drivers for companies like Meituan, or driving for ride-hailing apps like Didi.
This reality creates immense psychological pain. A young person who spent 18 years studying past midnight, entirely funded by the sacrifices of their parents, suddenly finds themselves delivering noodles for pennies. Why wouldn’t they want to lie flat?
Part 4: The Broken Promises of “996”
Even for those lucky enough to find white-collar work, the conditions are often brutal. This brings us to the infamous “996” work culture.
For years, the standard schedule in China’s booming tech and corporate sectors was 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week. Tech billionaires like Alibaba founder Jack Ma famously defended the 996 schedule, calling it a “huge blessing” for young workers who wanted to achieve success.
Ten years ago, young people accepted 996. Why? Because it paid off. If you worked 996 at a tech giant in 2014, you could expect massive bonuses, rapid promotions, and enough stock options to buy an apartment in Shenzhen or Hangzhou. The suffering had a clear reward.
Today, the reward is gone.
Economic growth has slowed. Tech companies are laying off workers, not handing out massive bonuses. Wage growth has stagnated. Yet, the expectation of grueling hours remains. Young workers are realizing they are sacrificing their physical and mental health simply to enrich their bosses, with no hope of achieving the middle-class dream.
Cases of young workers dying suddenly from overwork in corporate offices have sparked massive outrage online. In this context, “lying flat” isn’t laziness. It is self-preservation. It is a desperate attempt to reclaim personal health and dignity in a system that views workers as disposable batteries.
Part 5: The Cost of Living and the Demographic Time Bomb
If work is unrewarding, the traditional markers of adulthood are becoming entirely unreachable.
The Real Estate Trap
In China, owning a home is not just an investment; it is a cultural prerequisite for adulthood. Traditionally, a man must own an apartment before a family will agree to let him marry their daughter.
But Chinese real estate prices have become wildly detached from local incomes. In cities like Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen, the average apartment costs upwards of 30 to 40 times the average annual salary. (For comparison, in many Western cities, a ratio of 5 to 7 times the annual salary is considered severely unaffordable).
Even with parents emptying their retirement accounts to help with the down payment, the math simply does not work for an average young worker. And with the ongoing collapse of massive property developers like Evergrande and Country Garden, the real estate market is viewed with deep suspicion. Why sacrifice your youth to pay off a 30-year mortgage for a tiny concrete box that might lose half its value—or never be finished at all?
“We Are the Last Generation”
This financial impossibility bleeds directly into China’s demographic crisis. The government is desperate for young people to marry and have children. After decades of the strict One-Child Policy, the population is rapidly aging, and the workforce is shrinking. Beijing has shifted from forcing people to stop having kids to practically begging them to have two or three.
But the youth are refusing. Raising a child in China is incredibly expensive, largely due to the intense competition for good schools and the high cost of urban living.
During the strict COVID-19 lockdowns in Shanghai in 2022, a video went viral that perfectly captured this generational despair. When police arrived at a young man’s door to threaten his family with punishment that would “affect three generations” if he did not comply with quarantine orders, the man calmly replied: “We are the last generation, thank you.”
That phrase became a rallying cry. It encapsulates the ultimate form of “lying flat.” By refusing to reproduce, the youth are refusing to supply the state with the next generation of laborers, consumers, and taxpayers.
Part 6: “Eating Bitterness” – The State’s Tone-Deaf Pitch
Faced with this massive crisis of morale, the Chinese Communist Party has tried to intervene. But their messaging has often backfired spectacularly, revealing a massive generational divide.
The official state response has largely been to scold the youth for being too soft. In state media editorials and official speeches, leaders frequently urge young people to “eat bitterness” ( chi ku ).
This is an old Chinese idiom that means to endure hardship and push through suffering. President Xi Jinping, who famously spent years performing hard manual labor in rural caves during the Cultural Revolution, has repeatedly told young people that they need to roll up their sleeves, go to the countryside, and embrace hard work. The state media frequently runs profiles of highly educated graduates who supposedly found joy and fulfillment by returning to their home villages to grow fruit or work in manufacturing.
To the youth, this messaging is incredibly tone-deaf.
The generation currently in their 20s and early 30s grew up during China’s most prosperous era. They were raised in modern cities, armed with smartphones, and taught that they were destined for greatness. They are the highly educated, tech-savvy products of modern globalization.
Telling them to “eat bitterness” and go work in a factory feels like a massive betrayal of the social contract. It feels like the government is admitting it cannot provide a modern, high-income economy, and is instead demanding that the youth lower their expectations to match the state’s failures.
On Chinese social media platforms like Xiaohongshu (Little Red Book) and Weibo, users quietly mock the state’s advice. “The older generation ate bitterness so they could buy a house and build a life,” one popular, quickly-deleted comment read. “If I eat bitterness today, I just get more bitterness tomorrow.”
You can explore more about the government’s campaign urging youth to “eat bitterness” via the South China Morning Post .
Part 7: The Rise of “Full-Time Children”
As traditional paths close, new, unconventional lifestyles are emerging. One of the most fascinating phenomena is the rise of “full-time children” ( quan zhi er nv ).
Unable to find jobs that pay enough to cover rent, and burned out by the pressure of the job hunt, hundreds of thousands of young adults are moving back in with their parents. But they aren’t just lounging around. In a uniquely Chinese twist, many are drawing up actual “employment contracts” with their parents.
The parents pay the child a monthly stipend (often drawn from the parents’ pensions). In return, the child takes on the role of a full-time household manager. They cook the meals, clean the apartment, buy the groceries, and—crucially—take care of aging grandparents.
Given how expensive elder care is in China, and how weak the social safety net is, many parents find that paying their unemployed 26-year-old with a master’s degree to manage the house is actually a smart financial move.
It is a coping mechanism for a broken economy. It keeps the youth off the streets and provides a temporary safety net. But from a macroeconomic perspective, it is a disaster. A country cannot build a superpower economy when its brightest, most educated young minds are stuck at home, cooking dinner for their parents instead of innovating, starting businesses, or consuming goods in the broader market.
Part 8: Why the CIA Narrative is Dangerous
This brings us back to the government’s attempt to blame the CIA and foreign forces for this societal malaise.
Why push a conspiracy theory when the economic facts are so obvious?
Because acknowledging the truth is politically dangerous for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The legitimacy of the CCP rests heavily on its ability to provide endless economic growth and upward mobility. For decades, the Party’s unspoken argument to the people was: “Give us absolute political control, and we will make you rich.”
If the government admits that the economy is structurally flawed, that the property market was a bubble, and that millions of young people have been educated for jobs that do not exist, it risks breaking that core promise. It would require admitting policy failures at the highest levels of government.
Blaming the CIA is an easy out. It transforms an economic failure into a national security threat. It allows the government to deploy its security apparatus against the problem. If “lying flat” is framed as a foreign mind-virus, then the state doesn’t need to reform the economy; it just needs to tighten internet censorship, arrest outspoken online influencers, and increase ideological education in schools.
We see this playing out in real-time. Social media groups dedicated to minimalism, early retirement, and “lying flat” have been systematically scrubbed from platforms like Douban and WeChat. State censors work overtime to delete viral videos of young people complaining about their lack of money. The government is treating economic despair as if it were a contagious, foreign-born disease.
But you cannot censor an empty bank account. You cannot arrest an unpaid mortgage. The state can delete the words “lying flat” from the internet, but it cannot force a depressed, exhausted generation back onto the factory floor.
Part 9: What Happens Next? The Global Implications
The world should be paying close attention to the silent strike of China’s youth. The consequences stretch far beyond China’s borders.
China has been the engine of global economic growth for the past twenty years. It is the world’s factory floor and its most ravenous consumer market. If China’s middle class stops growing, if its youth stop buying cars, luxury goods, and smartphones, the ripple effects will be felt in boardrooms from New York to Berlin.
Furthermore, a pessimistic, withdrawn youth poses a massive challenge to Beijing’s geopolitical ambitions. President Xi Jinping has outlined a grand vision for “national rejuvenation,” aiming to make China the world’s dominant technological and military power by the middle of the century. That vision requires a highly motivated, innovative, and deeply patriotic workforce. It requires young engineers willing to build the next generation of microchips, and young families willing to raise the next generation of soldiers.
If the youth continue to “let it rot,” that grand vision is in serious jeopardy.
Some economists argue that China is entering a period similar to Japan’s “Lost Decades” in the 1990s and 2000s, where a massive property bubble burst, leading to years of stagnant growth. During that time, Japan saw the rise of the hikikomori —young people who completely withdrew from society, locking themselves in their bedrooms for years. China is currently showing alarming parallels, albeit on a much more massive scale.
Conclusion: The Disconnect
Ultimately, the Chinese government’s assertion that the CIA is responsible for the “lying flat” movement represents a profound misunderstanding of its own people.
The young people in Beijing, Shanghai, and Chengdu are not listening to foreign whispers. They are simply doing the math. They have realized that the rules of the game have changed, and that playing by the old rules only guarantees exhaustion and financial ruin.
They do not want to overthrow the government. They do not want a revolution. They just want a break. They want a life where working a full-time job actually pays enough to live, where a decent apartment doesn’t cost thirty years of wages, and where their worth is not entirely defined by their productivity.
Until the Chinese government addresses these fundamental economic and social realities, no amount of national security propaganda, censorship, or speeches about “eating bitterness” will get the youth to stand back up. The foreign interference narrative may comfort aging officials in Beijing, but on the ground, the youth will continue to lie down—quietly, stubbornly, and inevitably.
