Five years ago, Luo Huazhong discovered that he enjoyed doing nothing. He quit his job as a factory worker in China, biked 1,300 miles from Sichuan Province to Tibet and decided he could get by on odd jobs and $60 a month from his savings. He called his new lifestyle 'lying flat', reported The NYT.

“I have been chilling,” Luo, 31, wrote in a blog post in April, describing his way of life. “I don’t feel like there’s anything wrong.”

He titled his post “Lying Flat Is Justice,” attaching a photo of himself lying on his bed in a dark room with the curtains drawn. Before long, the post was being celebrated by Chinese millennials as an anti-consumerist manifesto. “Lying flat” went viral and has since become a broader statement about Chinese society.

China, a generation ago, had witnessed people working hard, marrying and then having children.

The country’s authoritarianism was seen as a fair trade-off as millions were lifted out of poverty. But with employees working longer hours and housing prices rising faster than incomes, many young Chinese fear they will be the first generation not to do better than their parents, the American newspaper reported.

They are now defying the country’s long-held prosperity narrative by refusing to participate in it.

Luo’s blog post was removed by censors, who saw it as an affront to Beijing’s economic ambitions. Mentions of “lying flat” — tangping, as it’s known in Mandarin — are heavily restricted on the Chinese internet. An official counter narrative has also emerged, encouraging young people to work hard for the sake of the country’s future, the newspaper reported.

“After working for so long, I just felt numb, like a machine,” Luo said in an interview. “And so I resigned.”

To lie flat means to forgo marriage, not have children, stay unemployed and eschew material wants such as a house or a car. It is the opposite of what China’s leaders have asked of their people. But that didn’t bother Leon Ding, reports The New York Times.

Ding, 22, has been lying flat for almost three months and thinks of the act as “silent resistance.”

He dropped out of university in his final year in March because he didn’t like the computer science major his parents had chosen for him, the newspaper reported.

After leaving school, Ding used his savings to rent a room in Shenzhen.

He tried to get a regular office job but soon he was able to understand that he needed to work long hours for that.

“I want a stable job that allows me to have my own time to relax, but where can I find it?” he told NYT.

Image: Unsplash

Ding thinks young people should work hard for what they love, but not “996” — 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week — as many employers in China expect. Frustrated with the job search, he decided that “lying flat” was the way to go, The New York Times reported.

“To be honest, it feels really comfortable,” he said. “I don’t want to be too hard on myself.”

To make ends meet, Ding gets paid to play video games and has minimized his spending by doing things like cutting out his favorite bubble tea.

Asked about his long-term plans, he  told the American newspaper: “Come back and ask me in six months. I only plan for six months.”

'Lying flat' has now emerged as a new  counterculture movement in China.

It is seen as a counter to China’s hypercompetitive work environment.

Xiang Biao, a professor of social anthropology at Oxford University who focuses on Chinese society, called tangping culture a turning point for China.

“Young people feel a kind of pressure that they cannot explain and they feel that promises were broken,” he told the newspaper. “People realize that material betterment is no longer the single most important source of meaning in life,” he told the newspaper.

The ruling Communist Party, wary of any form of social instability, has targeted the “lying flat” idea as a threat to stability in China. Censors have deleted a tangping group with more than 9,000 members on Douban, a popular internet forum. The authorities also barred posts on another tangping forum with more than 200,000 members, The New York Times reported.