In September 2020, a video of a young man riding a bicycle at Beijing’s élite Tsinghua University while simultaneously working on his laptop went viral on Chinese social media. The commenters roasted the insane work ethic and dubbed him “Tsinghua’s Involuted King”. Later, photos of exhausted students slumping in cafes with mountains of books were flooded with comments complaining about the “involution of élite education”.

The anthropologist Xiang Biao described involution as “the experience of being locked in competition that one ultimately knows is meaningless; it is acceleration without a destination, progress without a purpose, Sisyphus spinning the wheels of a perpetual-motion Peloton”. The term was popularised by American anthropologist Clifford Geertz in his book “Agricultural Innovation” in 1963 about his observations about the agricultural labour force in the Dutch East Indies.

The term has become a buzzword among China’s younger generation to describe the toxic ‘996’ work culture they have inherited. A gruelling schedule has been adopted by many Chinese tech companies spanning from 9 am to 9 pm, six days per week, totalling to an exhausting 72 hours per week. At the technology giant Huawei, this extreme work environment has been dubbed “wolf culture”, a climate of fierce internal workplace competition in which workers must either kill or be killed.

“People born in the 70s and early 80s work to survive, they value accomplishments brought about by the material aspects and their payback for their family,” said Sun Xianhong, head of hiring at Oriental Yuhong, in an interview for the South China Morning Post. “But for the Gen Z, or people born after 95, their financial situation is better off and they never had to starve. So, they are looking for higher goals, such as having more say at work, more freedom, and shared values with the company.”

With different goals from their parents, Gen Z workers are increasingly searching for value and identity in their jobs. Companies are finding it harder to bring in new talent, with more jobs available workers are more willing to change jobs and students less eager to go to campus recruitment events. “While employers traditionally dismissed workers, now Gen Z workers are doing the firing,” says Chen Long, a postdoctoral fellow in sociology at Peking University. “They value happiness and think there’s much more to life than just work.” This simmering dissatisfaction with the 996 system has erupted into the anti-work “lying flat movement”. (躺平, tang ping)

The “lying flat” movement started with a blog post on Baidu Tieba, the most used Chinese communication platform, by Luo Huazhong. In his manifesto "Lying Flat Is Justice", the factory worker shared his experiences from two years of joblessness, cycling from Sichuan to Tibet and then across China to Zhejiang. 

He argues the stress of contemporary life is unnecessary and the vestige of an old-fashioned mindset. It is possible and desirable to find independence in resignation. “I can be like Diogenes, who sleeps in his own barrel taking in the sun.” The movement calls on young professionals and workers to reject consumer fulfilment and encourages living a low-key, minimalist lifestyle. The movement has resonated with a growing silent majority of youth disillusioned by the officially endorsed "China Dream", who see social mobility as increasingly difficult.

The movement has inspired countless memes flooding social media and spawning the catchphrase "a chive lying flat is difficult to reap" (躺平的韭菜不好割,). A viral poem inspired by the movement reads, “Lying flat, is to not bow down. Lying flat, is to not kneel. Lying flat, is to stand up horizontally. Lying flat, is a straight spine.”

While involution describes a growing anxiety and discontent over the lack of progress in life no matter the effort put in, “lying flat” promises release from the crush of life and work in a fast-paced society and technology sector where competition is unrelenting.

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Discussions about “lying flat” picked up pace in May 2021, as young Chinese, overworked and overstressed, weighed the merits of relinquishing ambition, spurning effort, and refusing to bear hardship. “I wanted to fight for socialism today,” Zhao Zengliang, a twenty-seven-year-old Internet personality, wrote in a representative post. “But the weather is so freaking cold that I’m only able to lay on the bed to play on my mobile phone.”

The Chinese leadership sees the movement, not as passive resistance but a threat to the national drive for development at the height of the nation’s grand ambitions for a “new era”. A month after Huazhong’s original post, the state media issued a series of rebuttals. “The creative contribution of our youth is indispensable to achieving the goal of high-quality development,” Wang Xingyu, an official at the China University of Labour Relations wrote in the Guangming Daily. “Attending to those ‘lying flat,’ and giving them the will to struggle, is a prime necessity for our country as it faces the task of transitioning development”. Posts on lying flat are strictly restricted, the original post has been removed and a discussion group of nearly 10,000 followers on Chinese social media site Douban is no longer accessible. Nanfang Daily, the mouthpiece of Guangdong’s CCP leadership, ran a page-four commentary expressing disgust over the notion of ‘lying flat’.

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Despite the clampdown, the philosophy of lying flat movement has proved difficult to keep off the internet. The movement has evolved its own aesthetics inspired by vlogger Li Ziqi. Her YouTube channel has more than 2.4 billion views and 16 million subscribers making her the largest Chinese language channel. Her videos are a romanticised look at life in rural China and show her planting seeds, making bamboo furniture, spinning cotton or cooking on a wood stove captured with soft filters. 

In a country that holds few positive images of rural life since the cultural revolution, a rural utopia is a novel idea. The movement aspires to a romantic anti-modernism unburdened by the stress of connivances or cash that seem to define life in modern China.