China Power | Politics | East Asia

Why China Treats ‘Lying Flat’ as a National Security Threat

It’s not about the economy at all: In a system that defines not struggling as a crime, opting out is a public offense.

China’s Ministry of State Security posted a video on its WeChat public account on April 28, defining the behavior of “lying flat” (tangping) as an attempt to poison Chinese youth with ideological infiltration by hostile foreign forces. How can a lifestyle attitude become a national security issue? 

The mainstream analysis takes “lying flat” as an economic phenomenon rooted in the assumption that economic performance is the core of Chinese legitimacy. Of course, youth unemployment, unaffordable house prices, “996,” “flowing downward,” etc., are real problems that have caused the desperation of the youth. However, the economic perspective can only be used to analyze the civilians’ decision. It cannot answer why the Chinese government needed to use the state security apparatus to address a labor market issue. 

Another potential explanation is that Chinese bureaucrats tend to externalize domestic issues, so it is just the same old playbook. But it still cannot explain why the Ministry of State Security – not the Ministry of Human Resources or the Communist Youth League – was the one responding. 

The key is that lying flat is not, for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), an economic problem. Rather, it is an existential threat to its operating logic.

In September 2019, Xi Jinping delivered a speech to early and mid-career cadres at the Central Party School, emphasizing the word “struggle” (douzheng) 58 times. Two years later, he expressed the same demand again with heavier words: “Always wanting to live peaceful days and not wanting to struggle is unrealistic.” Xi added that failing to “struggle” for principles “is irresponsibility toward the party and the people. It is even a crime.” 

This Maoist language had faded away during the era of Deng Xiaoping’s “make money quietly” mantra and the technocratic governance of Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao. To revive it, Xi needs to shout it out at a larger volume. Therefore, he insists that being eager for peace is impractical and illusory and refusing to struggle is not only weak but criminal. Xi is not responding to an external threat but stipulating a permanent status of being. 

In this context, we can now more easily understand the Ministry of State Security’s reaction: when the young say “I am lying down,” they are not refusing to work, but refusing the narrative that “struggling” is an obligation owed to the party and the nation. In a system that defines not struggling as a crime, this open declaration is a public offense.

The genealogy of “struggling is an obligation” can be traced to the history of a slogan. In the 1960s, oil worker Wang Jinxi once said, “If conditions exist, do it; if conditions don’t exist, create the conditions and then do it.” He meant that people must conquer the poverty of material conditions with willpower. This was the basic logic of the revolutionary era. 

However, the slogan was subtly changed over decades of repetition and dissemination: “conditions” (tiaojian) was replaced by “difficulties” (kunnan).: “If difficulties exist, do it; if difficulties don’t exist, create difficulties and then do it.” The whole direction was reversed. The satire from the grassroots level captured the true spirit of the whole system more than the academic analysis did. Wang’s version emphasized that no obstacles could stop us; the popular variant said that what matters is the procedure of facing obstacles, because the system values overcoming obstacles more than solving the problems. The action of overcoming is an essence of the system that should not be stopped. 

In 1970, the CCP’s theoretical journal, Red Flag, published an investigation report on the Jilin grease factory. In the interview, the workers claimed, “For revolution, there are no difficulties that cannot be overcome; for........

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