You Can’t Lie Flat Without Someone Paying the Bills

The media has a set narrative for China's tang ping (躺平, "lying flat") phenomenon: in the face of a dire labor market and intense work hours for little return, the Chinese youths are reevaluating what makes life worth living. The result, for many, is to simply stop competing, minimize living costs, and curtail personal ambitions. This narrative is underpinned by China's economic failings. The failure to provide an increasing number of highly educated youths with employment that is both gainful and lucrative results in a negative spiral of lower consumption and animal spirits that, in turn, kills off more productive jobs.

It is a clean and convincing narrative...except for a glaring question. For millions to be able to lie flat and stay unemployed for years, someone needs to feed them, no matter how little expenditure they incur in everyday life. The Chinese government's aversion to welfarism means the state is certainly not going to subsidize the youths' unproductive lifestyle. If anything, the state, logically, criticizes the entire lying flat movement as a waste of talent and a drag on China's economic dynamism, especially considering the country's perpetually declining birth rates.

Instead, the youths' parents and family members have stepped up, bankrolling the youths' rebelliousness. With the term kenlaozu (啃老族, "people gnawing on the old") entering everyday language, the traditional Chinese culture of the young paying for the old has now been flipped upside down. In a country where just a generation ago, many had no substantial assets to begin with, the older generation is not burning through their savings on children that they had no plans to pay for into their 30s and beyond. Surely, many are dismayed and angry.

So why not just kick out the kids and force them to pay for their own lying-flat lifestyle? Yes, the youth unemployment rate is hovering at 19%, but many youths are spurning positions that could at least bring some income, if not at the fields and salary levels that they had imagined after trudging through the country's grueling educational system. Instead, it seems many more lament the lack of opportunities than where their next meal might come from. Some might be anxious about parental pressure, but few talk about finding themselves locked out of the family home.

That reality points to a different element propagating lying flat: China's warping but undying collectivist culture. For Chinese parents, nothing can be more shameful than letting others know that their children are failures. And nothing illustrates their own capabilities more than boasting of their success. Hence the children-comparing contests at group dinners. The flip side is the need to save face, for themselves and the family as a whole, by hiding failures at home. If the unemployed children are willing to cooperate, then the cost of feeding them three meals a day and sparing a bedroom is worth it.

That calculation is made possible not just by China's economic failures, but also by its success. Surely in the decades past, some kids also wanted to drop out of the rat race or simply had no talent to stay in it. But with widespread poverty, there was no choice but to work. If parents could not feed you, you had to hustle outside the family home, even if you really wanted to lie flat. Collectivism means little if resources are stretched thin. Filial piety is empty words without money transfers as a concrete expression. Tang ping is really a luxury for the privileged few who can afford it.

If the Chinese economy is really in the dire straits that are commonly portrayed, the whole lie-flat culture may not last. The current generation of face-saving parents will soon die off or have little left to spend on their homebound kids as their own jobs become more precarious. The lucky few youngsters will inherit a fortune, turning them from unemployed to purveyors of a luxury lifestyle and business investments. Many more will have no choice but to scrape by with whatever jobs they can get, after years of skills and diligence atrophied by staying at home.

If I could put in a word of advice to those lying flat, it is to be a bit more anxious about their own predicament. They might think their values are idealistic and lifestyles idyllic, but that reality is only temporarily possible. Collectivist culture has its limits, just like the bank accounts of aging parents with no further income and few years left on Earth. If they don't prepare for that day now, they'll find themselves desperate, aimless, and incapable of making ends meet. They had no role to play in China's past economic success. Unless they change, they'll have little say in its future either.