China’s lying down movement is quietly resisting the new Chicom rat-race mandates, but could it become something serious?
China demands productivity while the top 1% in China earn what the lower 50% earn and the authoritarian dictate of long hours without real pay is simply breaking the younger workers.
The “lying down campaign” is all about exiting the rate race. The truth is, no matter how hard you work, the cost of housing is so high, you will not be able to afford a decent place to live. While TFO Global paints this as a political movement, it may not be that simple.
Today’s workers almost all come from one-child families thanks to China’s unforgiving totalitarian “one-child” policy. They are used to pretty much having their own way, being spoiled, and not being asked to make sacrifices. They usually had two sets of grandparents and a mother and father doting on them.
But just as China needs to grow its own consumer economy and increase productivity as its population becomes older, with every one person now being responsible for two retirees, the cost of raising a family and buying a home have also risen dramatically, artificially. China now has a three-child policy and is pushing young people to reproduce as a patriotic duty, but these young people simply have no stomach for it.
Hence the lying down campaign. The idea is that just working real hard and getting married to have three children, all very expensive, is too much of a sacrifice and is materially impossible. Chinese housing prices in its cities is well in excess of the earnings of its workers, by a factor of 10-20 times in most cases. So lying down, putting the breaks on the mad rush to meet unrealistic quotas and exiting the rate race, is the only logical step.
This is not necessarily a political movement. Nobody is screaming “down with communism!” But the potential for this movement to become political, and dangerous, is not lost on the Communist dictatorship, which is actively shunning the lying down campaign as barbaric, unpatriotic, and criminal. Que the calls for rounding up the ringleaders.
These younger workers, all one-child policy victims who never had to learn to get along with other siblings or to hear a word of discipline from their parents and grandparents (who often lived with them), simply don’t feel any need for or see any benefit in working harder, much less having three children!
It’s hard to predict that this will be China’s undoing. The range of possibilities is large, the government is likely to find new ways to push conformity, to dramatically increase the birthrate and present productivity, and to even use robotics and automation, to assist. Moreover, the potential for forced euthanasia targeting infirm people and efforts to force older people to do some kind of work are also not off the table.
But this could become political, the countermeasures could not only fail but backfire, and what is now just a rebellion against a rat-race mentality could become rage against the entire system. A heavy-handed response could actually engender something deeper and more dangerous than people not wanting to work so hard or have so many children.
