Lying Flat: China’s Silent Rebellion Against the System | Digging into China

Hi, I'm Dong Xiong. Welcome to Digging into China, where we take a deep dive into what's really happening in China and share some unique insights. Today, let's talk about lying flat. Recently, China's Ministry of State Security dropped a video that takes absurdity to Olympic level. In it, they pin the whole phenomenon of Chinese people lying flat squarely on foreign forces, claiming outsiders are out there orchestrating this mass opt-out. But let's be real. Is the younger generation in China really lying flat because of some shadowy foreign plot? That's laughable. There are two core reasons, a surface-level one and a much deeper one. Let's start with the surface reason. It's straightforward. Right now in China, effort doesn't pay off like it used to. Take the classic Chinese path to beating the odds, study hard. For centuries since the imperial examination system began back in the Sui dynasty, education has been the ultimate change-your-destiny tool. But that tool is breaking down. There is a technical term in education economics, the rate of return on education, basically how much extra income you get for each additional year of schooling. In the 1980s and 1990s, that return was pretty low, around 3%. Back then, China's market economy was still immature and the country was still shaking off the cultural revolution. So four extra years of college only got you about 10% more pay than high school graduates. Then came market reform, and the numbers shot up. By 2000, the return had climbed to 8.1%. It peaked in 2009 at 9.7%. That was genuinely attractive. At that point, a bachelor's degree holder earned over 40% more than someone without one. But by 2020, it had fallen back to 4.5%. In 2023, it dropped further to 4%. We don't have the official 2025 number yet, but given the current situation, it's almost certainly even lower, right back to 1980-90s territory. A 3-4% return on education means more than a decade of grinding through books and exams might deliver less than 20% higher wages. And that's not just weak compared to the past, it looks terrible internationally too. America's return sits around 12.5%. The OECD average, Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, is 8%. And even famously laid-back Japan gets 9%. Worse still, China now has an inverted job market. Data from Zhaoping once showed college grads having lower employment rates than vocational grads, and masters and PhD holders doing worse than bachelors. At the root of this is stagnant graduate salaries. According to the MICOS China Undergraduate Employment Report, the average monthly starting salary for 2024 college grads was just 6,200 RMB, about $910. Nearly 60% earned under 6,000 RMB a month. Those poured in over 10,000 yuan right out of school, less than 10% of graduates. Sure, that's up about 800 yuan or 13% from 5,400 yuan in 2019, but adjust for inflation and the 5-year gain is basically zero or even negative. In real purchasing power. Go back further, from 2014 to 2019, average starting pay jumped from 3,500 yuan to nearly 5,500 yuan, a 56% increase. Compare that to the latest 5 years and the difference is night and day. Given these returns on education, who wants to keep grinding for higher degrees? Who's eager to pour all that energy into studying? You can't demand people hustle without giving them a fighting chance at real rewards. Forcing effort with no payoff is just bullying. Some parents still push their kids into this rat race, but that's mostly old thinking. They haven't shaken off the muscle memory from the high return era. The data makes it crystal clear. Educational lying flat isn't the result of foreign propaganda, it's the inevitable outcome of collapsing returns. And education is just a microcosm of what's happening across Chinese society. Right now, across China, there is a massive imbalance between what people put in and what they get out. In the past, the 996 overtime culture, sucking up to bosses, all that brutal competition, it wasn't because Chinese people love suffering. It worked. It delivered real gains. But what if the whole system no longer has a future? It's not just new grads. Wage growth across entire society has almost ground to a halt. The National Bureau of Statistics releases annual figures for urban, private, and non-private enterprises. In the golden years before 2014, wages routinely rose over 10% a year. After 2015, it slowed but still held at 7 to 8%. Since 2022, it's collapsed below 5%. In 2024, private sector wages rose just 1.7%, non-private 2.8%. Stunningly weak numbers. Data may be silent, but it carries weight. With numbers like these, how do you motivate people to keep pushing? When effort brings no reward, lying flat becomes the smartest play. These are still the surface issues. Dig deeper, and the real driver is a fundamental incompatibility between the Chinese people and the CCP system that the low growth has exposed. A 5% GDP growth rate might look decent compared to the US, Japan, South Korea, or Europe. But in China, 5% is deeply problematic. It's a growth rate the people and the party can no longer coexist with. First, that official 5% is heavily padded. Real growth is probably closer to 2 or 3%, maybe even below America's. Second, the quality of that GDP growth differs enormously from other countries. GDP gets split three ways, the state, business, and the people. In normal countries, it's roughly even. In China, power flows top-down. The party takes first, then enterprise. Then, if anything's left, the people. A 5% headline number gets sliced and diced before it ever reaches ordinary folks. And here is the kicker. The slower growth gets, the more aggressively the party and big players seem to grab their share. Look at spending. On paper, general public budget growth has slowed just 1% in 2025, 3.6% in 2024. But that's only the visible part of the iceberg. Hidden spending keeps rising. Since 2020, macro debt has grown over 10% annually, way above GDP growth and higher than the old 6-9% range. The economy slows, but the party borrows and spends more, pumping out subsidies and industrial support. Who foots the bill? The people. For every 100 yuan of GDP, if the party takes 20 yuan to subsidize favored companies, ordinary citizens get 20 yuan less. Enterprises are doing the same. Slow growth hasn't stopped big players from massively expanding their wealth. The government is notoriously shy about Gini coefficient numbers. The last official one is years old, and academic surveys show much higher inequality. We can see the trend in ultra-wealthy. In 2010, China's richest man, Zong Qinghou, topped the Huren list with 80 billion yuan when national GDP was 41 trillion. By 2025, Zhong Shanshan leads with 530 billion yuan while GDP sits at 140 trillion. GDP has roughly tripled, but the top fortune has multiplied nearly seven times. In 2021, China even surpassed U.S. in the number of billionaires despite having only about 60% of America's GDP. That's not something to brag about. It screams extreme inequality. Once GDP is announced, there is a feast of division. The party eats first, then enterprise, then the people. When growth was fast, the pie expanded quickly enough that scraps still reached ordinary folks. People were willing to endure because even modest gains felt worthwhile. At 5% official, maybe 2-2% real GDP growth rate, after layers of extraction, there is often nothing left, or even less than before. High growth was the fig leaf that hid the contradictions between the CCP's exploitative system and the Chinese people. Once that growth slows, the fig leaf is ripped away. Lying flat is the natural systemic eruption of that tension, a form of resistance. It just happens to be an incredibly soft, quiet one. The working horses are using passivity as their weapon, calling lying flat a silent protest. China's 21st century Gandhian non-cooperation movement isn't far off. That said, I don't believe this can continue forever. Not because I've suddenly aligned with Xi Jinping's thinking that everyone must hustle, but because lying flat lacks a sustainable foundation in China. People simply won't be able to keep it up. China's economic decline and social patterns look eerily similar to Japan's in the 1990s. Real estate bubble burst, deflation, massive trade surpluses beforehand. Japan's bubble collapse created its own lying flat generation, the failures or enlightened generation who checked out of consumption, marriage, and ambition. That mindset still defines much of Japan today. Back when China was booming, Chinese people loved to mock Japan's Somalis, but the conditions that led Japan lying flat don't exist in future China. When Japan began its long stagnation, per capita GDP was already over $30,000, and at the time, higher than America's by 30%. That gave them real cushion. China's per capita GDP today is only about $14,000. Japan's government debt-to-GDP ratio was just 60% when its crisis hit. It has since climbed above 300%. But the government used borrowing to provide a social safety net and buy time. China's macro debt ratio is already around 270% and growing over 10% a year. China is on a much shorter fuse. Japan had a slow descent, China's risk being a rapid plunge, one that will eventually make lying flat impossible. Take youth unemployment as a concrete example. Japan's bubble burst in 1991. Youth unemployment rose gradually, peaking at 10.3% in 2003. Twelve years later, China's real estate peak was around 2021, roughly 30 years behind Japan. So the real pain is still coming. China's youth unemployment numbers are a mess. In 2023, they spiked to 21.3%. Then Beijing changed the methodology, paused reporting, and magically brought it down to 15%. By August 2025, it was back up to 19%. The latest March figure is 16.9%, already 0.4 points higher than March last year. Given the strong seasonality that graduates flood the market in summer, this year's peak in August or September will almost certainly exceed 19%, possibly 20% plus. For context, in Japan's fifth year of decline in 1996, youth unemployment was only 6.7%, still 60% away from its peak. If China follows a similar trajectory, official youth unemployment could hit 30% by 2030 and 38% and more by 2033. Using the old pre-adjustment methodology, we'd already be looking at over 50% in 2023. Independent estimates like Peking University professor Zhang Dandan's 46.5% for 2023 paint an even darker picture. Continued decline could push real youth unemployment towards a catastrophic level by 2030. Mass-graduate unemployment will eventually break the lying-flat equilibrium. Not everyone can be supported by parents. Many families are struggling. Those who can't afford to stay idle will be forced back into the rat race, accepting brutal overtime, low pay, even jobs like security guards or wait staff they once scorned. That renewed youth competition will spill over and squeeze older workers too. If young people accept 996, 35-year-olds will have to follow. If young people take security jobs, what options remain for 60-year-olds? Years from now, we may look back on this lying-flat period with a strange nostalgia. It was brief, not glorious, but it will feel like a fleeting firework in China's story. Beyond economic reality, the CCP itself will never tolerate widespread lying-flat. For decades, they've boasted that China's success comes from their brilliant leadership and a superior system. The truth is simpler. It was built on the sweat and relentless competition of the Chinese people. In my view, the system has mostly been a drag. Without the party's extraction, such hardworking, competitive people should have reached developed nation status like Taiwan long ago. Now the tide has gone out. As people refuse to keep grinding, the system's weaknesses are fully exposed. The CCP is standing naked. Of course, they are panicking and cracking the whip. Xi Jinping may not even think in grand ideological terms. He might simply operate with the mindset of a ruthless boss or plantation owner. China is his giant enterprise, and he is the sole shareholder, or his giant slave state, and he is the only master. When the workers or slaves start slacking, the response is predictable. The whip. That Ministry of State Security video is essentially blowing the horn for the campaign against lying flat. In normal systems facing sharp contradictions from economic slowdown, the rational move would be for rulers and business to make concessions, give people more so they are motivated again. But unbound, short-sighted authoritarians and tycoons rarely do that. Instead, China has entered a vicious cycle. The worse the economy gets, the harder the ruling class extracts. The less people get, the less they exert themselves, the economy worsens further. Lying flat is a small act of resistance hoping to break that cycle. But it's probably too gentle to succeed. Looking ahead, I see only two paths for the Chinese people, either rebellion or endless soul-crushing involution until despair. I believe this prediction will be validated in the next five years. Feel free to come back and revisit this episode then. I hope every Chinese person comes to understand, without pushing back hard, there is no way out. Rebellion may well be the inescapable destiny. Thank you so much for watching. 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