China’s Ministry of State Security posted a video on its WeChat public account on April 28, defining the behavior of “lying flat” (tangping) as an attempt to poison Chinese youth with ideological infiltration by hostile foreign forces. How can a lifestyle attitude become a national security issue? 

The mainstream analysis takes “lying flat” as an economic phenomenon rooted in the assumption that economic performance is the core of Chinese legitimacy. Of course, youth unemployment, unaffordable house prices, “996,” “flowing downward,” etc., are real problems that have caused the desperation of the youth. However, the economic perspective can only be used to analyze the civilians’ decision. It cannot answer why the Chinese government needed to use the state security apparatus to address a labor market issue. 

Another potential explanation is that Chinese bureaucrats tend to externalize domestic issues, so it is just the same old playbook. But it still cannot explain why the Ministry of State Security – not the Ministry of Human Resources or the Communist Youth League – was the one responding. 

The key is that lying flat is not, for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), an economic problem. Rather, it is an existential threat to its operating logic.

In September 2019, Xi Jinping delivered a speech to early and mid-career cadres at the Central Party School, emphasizing the word “struggle” (douzheng) 58 times. Two years later, he expressed the same demand again with heavier words: “Always wanting to live peaceful days and not wanting to struggle is unrealistic.” Xi added that failing to “struggle” for principles “is irresponsibility toward the party and the people. It is even a crime.” 

This Maoist language had faded away during the era of Deng Xiaoping’s “make money quietly” mantra and the technocratic governance of Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao. To revive it, Xi needs to shout it out at a larger volume. Therefore, he insists that being eager for peace is impractical and illusory and refusing to struggle is not only weak but criminal. Xi is not responding to an external threat but stipulating a permanent status of being. 

In this context, we can now more easily understand the Ministry of State Security’s reaction: when the young say “I am lying down,” they are not refusing to work, but refusing the narrative that “struggling” is an obligation owed to the party and the nation. In a system that defines not struggling as a crime, this open declaration is a public offense.

The genealogy of “struggling is an obligation” can be traced to the history of a slogan. In the 1960s, oil worker Wang Jinxi once said, “If conditions exist, do it; if conditions don’t exist, create the conditions and then do it.” He meant that people must conquer the poverty of material conditions with willpower. This was the basic logic of the revolutionary era. 

However, the slogan was subtly changed over decades of repetition and dissemination: “conditions” (tiaojian) was replaced by “difficulties” (kunnan).: “If difficulties exist, do it; if difficulties don’t exist, create difficulties and then do it.” The whole direction was reversed. The satire from the grassroots level captured the true spirit of the whole system more than the academic analysis did. Wang’s version emphasized that no obstacles could stop us; the popular variant said that what matters is the procedure of facing obstacles, because the system values overcoming obstacles more than solving the problems. The action of overcoming is an essence of the system that should not be stopped. 

In 1970, the CCP’s theoretical journal, Red Flag, published an investigation report on the Jilin grease factory. In the interview, the workers claimed, “For revolution, there are no difficulties that cannot be overcome; for revolution, there are no hardships that cannot be endured; for revolution, there is no moment of satisfaction.” The point is in the last part of the sentence. This is not a statement of production efficiency, but a regulation of political subjectivity – the reason for your existence is to struggle endlessly. 

Moving forward to 2016, a county party secretary in Hebei repeated the satirical version “If difficulties exist, do it; if difficulties don’t exist, create difficulties and then do it” word-for-word, without irony, in an interview with the State Bureau for Letters and Calls. He did not realize that he was quoting the parody, not the original. But this is precisely the point: mockery never functioned as resistance. People laughed at the absurdity and applied the same logic until they forgot the satire’s core meaning. This is a political-cultural symptom of a compulsion to struggle that has become second nature.

The logic is not merely coercive. The reason it can outlive most repression is that it provides participants with a real sense of subjective pleasure – the feeling of conquering, of overcoming, the excitement of “I am doing something important.” People signed up for community volunteering during the zero-COVID period because they found a sense of power and purpose behind the white hazmat suits. Diplomats choosing pride and glory over strategic results by performing wolf-warrior stances toward the West are also ruled by the same mindset. These are not the so-called “strategic miscalculations” in a rational-actor framework. This is the system functioning as designed. The emotion of overcoming itself is the source of political legitimacy. 

The logic is so prevalent that it can reproduce itself even among the grassroots. For example, overseas Chinese communities repeat Xi’s language about “feeding lazy people” (yang lanhan) literally word-for-word to mock welfare states. This is not because they have done any economic calculation, but because the logic “suffering, struggling, deserving” has become a moral instinct of the people under the system.

This is why “lying flat” is causing more anxiety to the system than protesting. The protesters are still in the game, but lying flat is to quit the game. It does not challenge the regime but ignores the system. To a system relying on mobilization, indifference is more lethal than opposition, because you cannot struggle against an opponent who refuses to struggle back. Protest gives the state an enemy to overcome – exactly what it needs. Silence gives it nothing. 

That’s why Xi complained to cadres that many of them “always hope everything will be peaceful and calm. Having more than enough desire for stability, but not enough spirit of struggle.” Seven years later, the Ministry of State Security applied the same diagnosis to an entire generation of young people.

The conventional analysis of Chinese stability assumes that political legitimacy derives from economic performance. This assumption is not wrong, but it is incomplete. Since the PRC regime relies on emotional mobilization rather than economic output, the signal that needs tracking is not only the wallets of the people, but the sentiments of “struggling” among them. When the party’s propaganda increasingly deploys the term “struggle,” young people invent new phrases to refuse it. 

The widening gap between the two is itself the most revealing indicator. By claiming lying flat as a state security issue, we can see an obvious signal that the policymaking of the current Chinese government is driven more by political security concerns than by economic indices. For those trying to read where China is headed or how to deal with it, this is not a minor angle. It is the main story.