Disarticulating Qingnian: Chinese Youth beyond ‘Rising Tides’ and ‘Lying Flat’

Abstract

Youth (青年, qingnian) as a subject has been a key element in the ideal of national rejuvenation since the beginning of the twentieth century-from the May Fourth Movement to the Communist Revolution, from the Cultural Revolution to the 1989 Democracy Movement (Song 2016; for a discussion of the ambiguity of biological and sociological categorisations of youth, see Lanza 2012). Over the past decade, different but interacting discourses on the history, definition, and role of youth have emerged and sometimes clashed, including the normative-prescriptive discourse of the Party-State, the productive and hedonistic discourse of the market, and the discourse of societal autonomy and heterogeneity. In his article 'World Factory', Christopher Connery (2020) proposed defining the decade from 2005 to 2015 as the 'post-WTO era'-a useful periodisation forThe ideas expressed in this essay draw from an article entitled 'Beyond "Rising Tides" and "Lying Flat": Emergent Cultural Practices among Youth in Urban China', forthcoming in the 2022 spring issue of CLC Web: Comparative Literature and Culture.

Collective memory and social imaginaries of the epidemic situation in COVID-19—based on the qualitative research of college students in Wuhan, China

“…In 2021, a popular online hot word in China was " " (lying-flat), which means refusing to strive for upward social mobility (Gong and Liu, 2022). Lin and Gullotta (2021) thinks that it expresses young peoples with theme frustration and exhaustion. However, in our research, we found that even if young students chose to lying-flat, they didn't feel disappointed with the country.…”

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“…Curiously, when the CCP's Zero Covid strategy was challenged-first in Hong Kong in early 2022, and then in Shanghai in April 2022-Chinese state media began criticising the approach of coexistence with the virus (often referring to 'Western countries') as a tangping (躺平) strategy that put human life at risk. As a buzzword that came to the fore in China in 2021, tangping (literally, 'lying flat') originally referred to a movement launched by young people who chose to lie flat and withdraw from the rat race to protest the overwork culture prevalent especially in China's tech industries (Lin and Gullotta 2022). Despite the aleatory nature of this 'movement', as early as February 2022, when the fifth wave of Covid was wreaking havoc in Hong Kong, Chinese officials and state media began to twist the meaning of tangping, associating it with their Covid strategies.…”

Development and Validation of the “Lying Flat” Tendency Scale for the Youth

“…"Lying flat" is a specific cultural phenomenon produced by the intensification of social competition and rapid social development, which is a typical modernity problem [5]. Due to the fear of fierce social competition, some young people choose to actively withdraw from the competition, and attempt to retreat, escape, and give up in the way of fierce social competition, which is the active abandonment and retreat of a "good life" [3,[6][7][8][9][10]. Some other young people have also tried hard to pursue their own ideals, but become repeatedly frustrated, thus their inner sense of helplessness continues to accumulate, and they finally choose to give up the struggle and naturally embark on the road of "lying flat" [3,[6][7][8][9][10].…”

“…Due to the fear of fierce social competition, some young people choose to actively withdraw from the competition, and attempt to retreat, escape, and give up in the way of fierce social competition, which is the active abandonment and retreat of a "good life" [3,[6][7][8][9][10]. Some other young people have also tried hard to pursue their own ideals, but become repeatedly frustrated, thus their inner sense of helplessness continues to accumulate, and they finally choose to give up the struggle and naturally embark on the road of "lying flat" [3,[6][7][8][9][10]. Whether it is the former, or the latter, they have shown the common characteristics of "lying flat": no hope for life, no goals, no desire, no progress, no action, resting on the status quo, unwilling to struggle, do not want to work hard, do not want to move up, just getting by, negativity and laziness, confusion, and abandonment [3,[6][7][8][9][10][11][12].…”

“…Since "lying flat" became a buzzword on the Internet, it has caused extensive discussion in the theoretical world [1][2][3][5][6][7][8][9][10][11]19,20,[28][29][30][31]. Many scholars believe that "lying flat" will have many negative effects on individuals and society: it will not only aggravate the value confusion of the youth, but also promote the bad trend of social "decadence", and even affect the progress of the modernization process of the whole country [5,6,[28][29][30][31].…”