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Fed up with the stress of work, Guo Jianlong quit a newspaper job in Beijing and moved to southwest China to “lie flat.”
Guo joined a small but visible handful of Chinese city professionals who are shaking up the ruling Communist Party by rejecting grueling careers for “lifeless lives.” This collides with the party’s message of success and consumption, which is celebrating its 100th anniversary.
Guo, 44, became a freelance writer in Dali, a city in Yunnan Province known for its traditional architecture and scenic scenery. He married a woman he had met there.
“The work was fine, but I didn’t particularly like it,” said Guo. “What’s wrong with doing your own thing and not just looking at the money?”
“Lying flat” is a “resistance movement” against a “horror cycle” from Chinese high pressure schools to jobs with seemingly endless working hours, wrote the novelist Liao Zenghu in Caixin, the country’s most famous business magazine.
“In today’s society, our every move is monitored and every action criticized,” Liao wrote. “Is there an act more rebellious than just ‘lying flat’?”
It’s not clear how many people have gone so far as to quit their jobs or move out of the big cities. Judging by the crowded subways in Beijing and Shanghai, most young Chinese are working on the best jobs they can get.
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Nevertheless, the ruling party is trying to counter the trend. Beijing needs skilled workers to develop technology and other industries. China’s population is aging and the stock of working-age people has shrunk by about 5% from its peak in 2011.
“The fight itself is a kind of luck,” the party-published Southern Daily said in a comment. “It is not only unfair but also shameful to ‘lie flat’ in the face of the pressure.”
The trend mirrors similar ones in Japan and other countries, where young people have adopted anti-materialistic lifestyles in response to bleak job prospects and fierce competition for shrinking economic rewards.
Official data shows that China’s per capita economic output has doubled in the past decade, but many complain that profits went mostly to a handful of tycoons and state-owned companies. Professionals say their incomes are not keeping pace with rising housing, childcare and other costs.
As a sign of the political sensitivity of the issue, four professors, quoted by the Chinese press as “lying flat,” refused to discuss it with a foreign reporter.
Another possible sign of official displeasure: T-shirts, cell phone cases and other products on the subject of “Lie Flat” are disappearing from online sales platforms.
Urban workers complain that working hours have swelled to “9.96” or 9.00am to 9.00pm six days a week.
“We generally believe that slavery is extinct. In fact, it has only adapted to the new economic age, ”said a woman who writes under the name Xia Bingbao or Summer Hailstones on the social media service Douban.
Some elite graduates in their twenties, who should have the best career prospects, say they are exhausted from the “exam hell” of high school and university. They see no point in making more sacrifices.
“The hunt for fame and fortune doesn’t attract me. I’m so tired, ”said Zhai Xiangyu, a 25-year-old doctoral student.
Some professionals are cutting their careers, which removes their experience from the job pool.
Xu Zhunjiong, a human resources manager in Shanghai, said she would quit at 45, a decade before the legal retirement age for women, to move to his home with her Croatian-born husband.
“I want to retire early. I don’t want to fight anymore, ”said Xu. “I’m going to other places.”
Thousands vented their frustration online after the Communist Party announced in May that official birth limits would be eased to allow all couples to have three children instead of two. The party has been enforcing birth restrictions since 1980 to curb population growth, but fears that China, whose per capita economic output is still below the global average, will need more young workers.
Minutes after the announcement, websites were flooded with complaints that the move did not help parents cope with childcare costs, long hours, cramped housing, occupational discrimination against mothers and the need to look after older parents.
Xia writes that after working in Hong Kong, she moved to a valley in the Zhejiang province south of Shanghai for a “life poor”. She said that despite a high-level job as an English-speaking reporter, her rent consumed 60% of her income and she had no money at the end of each month.
She rejects the argument that young people who “lie flat” will give up economic success when it is already out of reach for many in an economy with a growing gap between the rich elite and the majority.
“When resources become more and more concentrated on the few people at the top and their relatives, the labor is cheap and replaceable,” she wrote on Douban. “Does it make sense to entrust your fate to small alms from others?”
Xia declined an interview request.
Guo, the writer in Dali, said he freelanced more hours than he did for a newspaper. But he’s happier and life is more comfortable: He and his wife have breakfast on the breezy balcony of the apartment on the sixth floor with a view of the trees.
“As long as I can write, I’m very happy,” said Guo. “I don’t feel constricted.”
A handful who can afford it are almost completely withdrawing from work.
A 27-year-old architect in Beijing said she started saving as a teenager in order to gain financial freedom.
“Since last September, when I saw that all of my savings reached 2 million (yuan) (US $ 300,000), I went to bed,” the woman, who would only name Nana, said of hers in an interview Social media account.
Nana said she turned down a job that paid 20,000 yuan ($ 3,000) a month because of the long hours and what she felt was limited opportunities for creativity.
“I want to be free from rigid rules,” said Nana. “I want to travel and make myself happy.”
source https://collegeeducationnewsllc.com/china-communist-party-unhappy-over-young-workers-leaving-careers/
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