The lying flat (躺平 - tǎng píng) phenomenon refers to young people in China choosing a simple, low-pressure lifestyle over the pursuit of career advancement and material wealth. The opposite extreme in contemporary China, overworking and competing, has been termed “involution” (内卷 - nèi juǎn).
“Involution” and “lying flat” appear opposed, but in reality are two sides of the same coin, both reflecting the anxiety and confusion of young people under systemic pressure in a Confucian society. A clear stance is: neither engage in “ineffective involution” nor choose “negative lying flat”. Some articles provide a more nuanced classification. Types of “lying flat” include:
- escapist lying flat is an active “world-withdrawing” posture of lowering desires and not participating in the social division of labor;
- resigned lying flat is a passive choice of lowering expectations after striving hard but still being unable to change one’s circumstances;
- self-mocking lying flat refers to verbally crying “lying flat” while not actually giving up striving in action, mainly used to express dissatisfaction with meaningless “involution” and to relieve pressure.
Types of “involution” include:
- “happy involution kings” (finding pleasure in multitasking),
- “sophisticated egoistic involution” (zero-sum competition),
- “forced involution” (following the crowd despite exhaustion).
Research from Chinese universities reveals nuanced perspectives on participation rates. Only 12.8% of young people have fully adopted the lying flat lifestyle, while a significant 58.7% remain actively struggling despite social pressure. This is something called 45-degrees life, which describes an intermediate state of seeking balance between being passively drawn into competition and actively withdrawing, trying to recover one’s own rhythm.
High housing prices in major cities create unaffordable living costs, low wages relative to cost of living and opportunity costs persist, employment difficulties particularly affect graduates entering the job market, and class solidification limits social mobility.
Writer Sun Yuliang, who doesn’t support lying flat but understands it as rational risk assessment, provides crucial context. Chinese small and medium enterprises have less than a 20% three-year survival rate, university student entrepreneurship failure reaches 95%, and when entrepreneurship shows negative expected returns, the lying flat choice becomes a calculated response to systemic risks. One academic source introduces a formula for understanding personal comfort in this context: individual effort minus system involution times despair value. This mathematical representation captures how young people calculate their willingness to invest effort when the system’s demands combined with feelings of hopelessness create an equation where continued struggle appears futile.
A Fudan University professor explains that high housing prices, low wages, employment difficulties, and class solidification create such intense stress that young people question whether continued struggle is worthwhile. This professor’s research highlights how these structural pressures combine to make traditional success paths seem increasingly unattainable.
A Tsinghua professor argues that lying flat is irresponsible toward parents and the country, framing the phenomenon through moral and social obligations rather than individual choice alone. This perspective emphasizes the Confucian intergenerational impact of youth disengagement.
The Chinese lying flat phenomenon is frequently compared in Chinese sources to Japan’s “low desire society” (低欲望社会 - Teiyokubō Shakai) from three decades ago. The concept was introduced in the book “How to Ignite the Low Desire Society: A New Theory of National Wealth in an Age Without Ambition” by management consultant and author Kenichi Ohmae in 2015, describing a society where consumption and ambition declined following economic stagnation. The author argues that the fundamental assumption of Abenomics (the economic policies implemented by the Japanese government since 2012, led by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe), that monetary easing and fiscal stimulus can rekindle people’s desire to consume and invest, is completely ineffective in a low-desire society. The more the government touts its policies, the more pessimistic the public becomes about the future, forming a “psychological” paradox.
Both capitalist and socialist with Chinese characteristics economies seem to be unable to provide youth with a way to live a normal life. But every country invents different terms and classifications for the struggle.