A breeze catches Ying Feng’s black hair and summer dress as she sits to watch the city below come to life. A lonely bird sings its song. “My parents taught me that if I needed peace, I would find it in church and prayer,” he says in the WeChat call. “But here in the hills outside Xiamen I found more peace than Christianity could ever give me.” As she speaks the first rays of the rising sun strike her face over the water beyond Xiamen. “I wish I could stop the sun right there,” she whispers, her eyes fixed on the red-orange hue of the sky. “Then I could stay here.” But he can’t stay. Instead, she gets up and puts her mask back on. “I have to go back,” she says suddenly sounding very tired, even though the day has only just begun. “Work on my teaching practice will begin soon.” When Ying Feng calls again, 14 hours have passed and she is at home in her rented apartment neatly folding her graduation certificate. He recently finished a degree in music and teaching at university, but the occasion was marked less by celebration and more by stress. “I couldn’t really be happy about it when I know how difficult things are going to be after the summer,” she explains. Before her lies the prospect of a work week as a primary school teacher by day, private tutoring at night and piano lessons at the weekend. Even if he takes it all on, he feels he won’t be able to earn enough to save for an apartment or start a family. Graduates from Chinese universities face increasingly tough competition for jobs, but some are opting out altogether by taking lower-paid work that gives them more time for themselves [File: Cnsphoto via Reuters] When asked if the prospect of an intense working life with low pay has made her rethink her career path, Ying Feng remains silent. “Sorry,” he apologizes and laughs exhaustedly. “12 hours of practice has drained my brain. What was the question again?’ Hearing the question once again, Ying Feng sighed. “Well, sometimes I just want to lay down and let it all rot.”
Lying down
Ying Feng is not alone in her frustration. “Lay down” (tang ping) and “let it rot” (bai lan) are two terms that have become rallying cries for Chinese youth exasperated by the Chinese labor market as well as the higher expectations of Chinese society. Since spring 2021, users on Chinese social media such as Douban, WeChat and Weibo have been sharing their own stories of how they left careers and ambitions behind to adopt a minimalist lifestyle with room for free time and self-exploration. Among them 31-year-old Alice Lu and 29-year-old Wei-zhe Wu. Lu was working in the communications and media department of a large IT company in Shanghai when she became ill. “I was working weekdays, weekends, days and nights for years when I felt my body and mind fall apart,” she explains. She had to take time off to recuperate and during this time began to question her work-life balance. In the end, she decided not to return to her field, but to open a noodle shop. “The shop may not be much, but it’s my business. Now I’m the master of my own schedule and find that I finally have time to do nothing.” It was also after a breakdown that Wu began to rethink his career. “In my case, it was my senior colleague who collapsed on the factory floor during a night inspection,” he says. “Then I began to wonder if this would be my fate after all.” Chinese commuters face an often grueling schedule with long working hours and six-day weeks the norm [File: Aly Song/Reuters] At the time, Wei-zhe Wu worked from 9am to 9pm six days a week as a project manager at a chemical factory outside Jinan, a northeastern city halfway between Beijing and Shanghai. “Although my job took up all my time, I realized that the dreams I had for my life could not be realized with my factory job.” He stands up and pulls a curtain aside to reveal the lights from the high-rise buildings of downtown Jinan twinkling in the night. “I would never have been able to afford to live there anyway,” he grumbles. So he quit his job, moved back in with his parents and started doing some freelance work. “My parents will probably push me back into the rat race soon, but for now I feel freer and healthier lying down.”
A threat to Xi?
While young Chinese giving up expectations and wanting more free time may not sound like much of a resistance, “doing nothing” has become one of the biggest sins in Chinese society according to Ying Feng. “We are taught from a young age that free time should be filled with productive and enriching activities.” This is reflected in statements by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and President Xi Jinping, in which they call on young people to work hard, think big and stay true to Chinese socialism. “Chinese youth are the vanguard against the challenges facing our nation on the road to rejuvenation,” Xi said at a ceremony marking the centenary of the founding of the Communist Youth League of China in May. Both the embrace of tang ping and bai lan and the Chinese leaders’ comments come at a time when several crises seem to be converging. “Demographic and economic challenges loom on the Chinese horizon,” explains Associate Professor Yao-Yuan Yeh, who teaches Chinese Studies at the University of St Thomas in the United States. “So it is important to the CCP that young people in China work hard and contribute their maximum to the Chinese economy. Especially now that the high growth that defined the Chinese economic miracle in recent decades is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain in the future.” This puts tang ping and bai lan in direct opposition to the demands of the CCP. While Xi calls on young people to think big and work hard to achieve their goals, tang ping revolves around lowering expectations and work intensity. And where Xi emphasizes rallying around the patriotic values articulated by the CCP, tang ping is about individuals finding peace within themselves. As a result, representatives of the CCP and Chinese state media called Tangping shameful and unpatriotic. Yu Minhong, the billionaire owner of a tutoring company, has gone so far as to call it “lying down” a threat to China’s future. Lying down is a potential threat to Xi Jinping’s efforts to encourage Chinese people to “think big” and keep the country’s economy growing [File: Florence Lo/Reuters] However, the attacks on “lying down” were not limited to rhetoric. Last year, The New York Times obtained a directive from China’s Internet regulator ordering online platforms to strictly limit new posts on tang ping. “I was a member of an online forum where we were discussing ‘lying down,’” Lou recalls. “We had reached about 100,000 members when suddenly we couldn’t post anything new on the site.” Yao, the academic, says the party is unlikely to allow the phenomenon to develop into a political movement that could threaten the dominance of either the party or Xi, who is expected to secure an unprecedented third term at a party congress. later this year. . “Given the Chinese authorities’ awareness of tang ping, any attempt to organize will be quashed.” However, if tang ping continues to spread and younger Chinese choose a lifestyle that rejects hard work, then it could become a danger to the CCP’s ambitions, he adds. When asked if she sees tang ping becoming a threat to the CCP, Alice Lu takes a deep breath. “Some things are better not discussed on WeChat.”
