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Young people in China have launched a countercultural movement called “lying flat.”
Lying flat is a backlash response to the Chinese ideal of working yourself ragged until you drop. Instead of becoming a slave to home and country, you relax a little. Or a lot. Some say that this is a manifesto against materialism.
In Chinese, lying flat is translated as tang ping and the Chinese government is NOT for it.
“It is necessary to prevent the stagnation of the social class, unblock the channels for upward social mobility, create opportunities for more people to become rich, and form an environment for improvement in which everyone participates, avoiding involution and lying flat,” President Xi Jinping said recently.
“Lying flat” t-shirts and hashtags are growing in popularity and the Chinese government is trying to curb the growth because they need a large and mobilized workforce to continue to be the China as we know it.
