China blames foreign spies for 'lying flat' trend surge

China's "lying flat" movement, young people opting out of a punishing work culture by doing as little as possible, has been quietly building since 2021. This week, Beijing decided it had seen enough.

The culprit, according to China's Ministry of State Security, is a foreign host who forces the conducting of a coordinated brainwashing campaign against Chinese youth.

What does lying flat mean?

Tang ping, translated as lying flat, is a rejection of China's relentless grind culture the expectation that young people will work exhausting hours in a difficult job market with little guarantee of the stability or prosperity their parents were promised. Rather than hustle, adherents simply don't. They minimise ambition, reduce consumption, and decline to compete on terms they consider rigged.

The movement has circulated in Chinese online culture for years. It shares DNA with the American bed rotting trend the social media shorthand for spending extended time in bed as a response to burnout and anxiety, though the Chinese version carries a more explicitly political edge, directed at economic structures rather than just personal stress.

In a post published on WeChat this week, China's Ministry of State Security stated that overseas organisations, unnamed, had funded anti-China media outlets, think tanks, and influencers to carry out a systematic "lying-flat brainwashing" campaign targeting Chinese youth.

The agency, whose mandate includes counterespionage, urged young people to stay vigilant, work hard, and reject the trend. 

The US spent years warning that ByteDance was using TikTok to erode American teens' values and ambitions through algorithmic influence. Beijing is now making an almost identical argument in the opposite direction that foreign adversaries are using cultural infiltration to undermine Chinese productivity. Both governments, it turns out, find idle teenagers politically threatening.