LAY-FLATTERS ARE NOT IN CHINA'S 100-YEAR PLAN
Disillusioned Youth Crash the Communist Party's Big Birthday Party
What’s Mandarin for “Take this job and shove it?” How about “Tune in. Turn on. Drop out?” China’s restless social media has lately thrown up an answer: “Tang ping.” This translates as “to lay flat,” apparently the preferred activity for a growing cohort of Chinese youth.
This is not the present Xi Jinping and the Beijing leadership wanted as they cajole the nation to celebrate the Communist Party of China’s 100th anniversary July 1. China’s astonishing rise in recent decades has depended on discipline. The best and brightest spend their early lives cramming for exams to elite universities. Then they spend their prime years buckling to a “996” workplace regime — shorthand for 9 am to 9 pm six days a week. At least that’s what state (and private sector) propaganda tells us, extolling Chinese vigor in contrast to the Decadent West. The odd suicide or heart attack on the job seems a small price to pay.
Now the lay-flatters aren’t having it. Their number can’t be gauged exactly, but it’s non-trivial. A professor at Tsinghua University, China’s Harvard/Oxford, lately berated his listless juniors online, declaiming: "Tang Ping is an Irresponsible Attitude, an Insult to Parents and Millions of Hardworking Taxpayers." Hashtags mocking this diatribe got 400 million (!) views on the Weibo app, Nikkei Asia reported. “Roll on while I lie flat,” a typical comment ran. “My life may be boring, but an interesting life costs a lot of money.”
The determination to lie flat is rooted in another hot concept among younger Chinese: “involution,” or “neijuan.” This term was coined in a very different context: early-1960s research by an American anthropologist named Clifford Geertz on peasant agriculture in Indonesia. He noted how more hands in the fields, from a growing population, failed to produce better yields thanks to stagnant technology and a system rigged by Dutch colonial rulers.
Chinese office workers 60 years later apparently relate, adapting the phrase to signify ever-more exhausting competition for a fixed number of seats in the good life, which really isn’t that good anyway. “The middle and upper classes are marked by a deep fear of falling downward,” explains Xiang Biao, a contemporary anthropology professor studying China from the safe perch of Oxford. “Their greater fear is losing what they already have.”
This mood is a long way from the triumphalism projected by official Beijing and its wolf warriors. But Biao’s words will sound painfully familiar to the Free World, being a prime mover of so-called right-wing populism. Which is exactly the point. China’s rulers managed to avoid the democratization that many expected to accompany economic prosperity. They can’t avoid all the psycho-social consequences of a country getting richer fast: rising expectations and slowing growth over a bigger base; young people questioning the rat race that was simple survival for their elders; generation gap and misunderstanding.
And China looks ill-equipped to cope with these consequences. Its proto-command system works well for building high-speed rail or crushing opposition newspapers like Hong Kong’s Apple Daily. It may work less well for getting lie-flatters up off their couches.
Decadent Western societies can morph to provide gainful activity for their armies of slackers and anti-establishment types: yoga studios, mindfulness cooperatives, environmental NGOs, or whatever. These counter-culture initiatives soon enough go mainstream and broaden the possibilities for success and fulfillment. Can Communist China develop this sort of organic flexibility? A lot of Chinese obviously don’t think so. You either get with the program or you lie flat.
Maybe this doesn’t matter so much to Corporate China and the global capital that backs it. If one young person is too lazy to get straight A-s and work 996, Alibaba (ticker: BABA) or Meituan (3960.Hong Kong) can always find someone who isn’t. But 400 million people questioning the underlying premises of a society whose premises are supposed to be beyond question is a lot, even for China. Something’s going to have to give. The next 100 years will be different.