views on social media app TikTok. The phrase gained momentum after a  

TikTok video was posted on the subject  by a software engineer in New York.

I recently learnt about this term called  Quiet quitting, Where you're not outright  

quitting your job but you're quitting  the idea of going above and beyond.  

But this isn't just an American phenomenon.  The rejection of hustle culture has been  

happening all around the world, including  China, where the movement started long  

before it was popularized in the West. I talk with my friends, and they often use  

that term like Tang Ping, I really want to lie  down and lie flat and I don't want to do my job  

and don't want to achieve something. It's more  like people's attitudes towards their life.

This is Dian Gu. He works as a content  specialist for an internet company in China.

Bai Lan is more like the definition  of quiet quitting. People don't want  

to commit more to their jobs and they just  do what the company require. So these kind  

of phrases are really commonly used by me, by  my friends, by the younger people in China.

Since 2021, the internet in China has been awash  with the phrases Tang Ping, which means 'lying  

flat,' and more recently Bai Lan, which means 'let  it rot'. This has coincided with many young people  

in China becoming increasingly frustrated with  both their personal and professional lives.

Unlike most countries, China has continued to  pursue a zero-Covid strategy, which requires  

strict and sudden lockdowns and extensive  testing for cities experiencing outbreaks,  

confining hundreds of millions  of Chinese people to their homes.

As a result, the country's economy has slowed  down and is struggling to boost growth.

The World Bank forecasts China  will grow just 2.8% in 2022,  

while the rest of the Asia-Pacific region  is expected to grow 5.3% on average. This  

is the first time China's GDP growth has  lagged behind its neighbors since 1990.

Amidst the economic uncertainty, youth  unemployment in cities rose to almost  

20% in July 2022 – the highest since the Chinese  government started publishing the figures in 2018.

As a result, the labor  market has shrunk since 2019.

At the same time, the number of people  entering higher education has grown  

rapidly over the past two decades, which  means there is fierce competition between  

graduates for white collar jobs. This has increased pressure on young  

people to outperform their peers  and has resulted in burnout.

You know naturally, people are  going to rebel against something 

that really undermines their physical,  moral and spiritual well-being.

Dr Maria Kordowicz, is an associate  professor in organizational behaviour  

at the University of Nottingham. I'd argue this isn't a new trend. It 

is new terminology and it has really  captured the imagination of the media,  

of the workplace. So this isn't the first time  that we have seen almost a mass ideology take  

shape around our relationship with work. So, the lying flat movement, for instance, 

in China, we could see as a real  reflection of that counterculture,  

and particularly young people in this case,  is my understanding, saying, “Well, enough is  

enough. This is not the sort of workplace that we  want to enter into, and things need to change.”

Burnout is also at an all-time high in the  U.S. According to a report released by the  

American Psychological Association.  44% of American workers reported  

physical fatigue – a 38% increase since 2019. It's also seen as a contributing factor for The 

Great Resignation, an economic phenomena which  saw a record number of resignations with young  

workers toward the end of the Covid-19 pandemic. The world's other major economies have also seen 

growing discussion around the drawbacks and even  dangers of long, unrelenting hours. Japan has  

a famously hard-working culture - a problem the  country has grappled with for decades. Karoshi - a  

Japanese term meaning death by overwork -  is, according to the Japanese government,  

responsible for 200 deaths a year, but  activists say the figure is closer to 10,000.

As campaigners raised awareness of Karoshi, the  late Prime Minister Shinzo Abe presented the  

“Work Style Reform” bill in 2018, which meant  employees were obligated to take holidays, a  

response to the 50 percent take-up of paid leave.  A Karoshi hotline was even created to support  

people who were suffering from excessive stress. Its effectiveness, however, is debateable, with  

critics saying company violations are difficult  to track and even more difficult to penalize.

Still, while Japan may be going someway to  address the impacts of its hard-working culture,

Chinese president Xi Jinping, called for the  country's youth to find 'great ideals' and  

for their goals to be a part of the 'bigger  picture' of the Chinese nation and people.

The quiet-quitting trend has been a far  less disruptive force in Europe,  

where working cultures are different. A 2022 report by Gallup on the state of the  

global workplace shows that employees in Europe  are the least engaged, when compared to the rest  

of the world's regions. But the region still ranks  highly when it comes to life evaluation, with 47%  

of respondents saying they were 'thriving'. In the same report, East Asia, which includes  

China and Japan, had the highest  regional percentage of daily stress.

Do you think that these various different  movements are all coming from the same place?  

It's a post pandemic hangover, and people  are reassessing their work life balance? 

Or are they unique to the countries  that they are happening in?

There absolutely is a difference in working  cultures. I think to use the word hangover is  

perhaps a little bit glib in that, you  know, this pandemic. I mean, it was an  

unprecedented global event. Sociological,  the psychological impact on individuals,  

on groups, on organizations on societies has  been huge, and I think that's something that 

we've universally shared across the world. But yes, there are differences in working 

cultures. You know, we hear about  the 996 working model, for instance,  

in China. So some organizations have introduced  nine until nine working days, six days a week.

You've lived in the UK and China?  Is the working culture different  

in the two countries? Do you think? In the UK, people are more like work life  

balanced. The work hour in the UK is much shorter.  But in China, I think the work hour is much more  

longer and also I think it's more demanding.  People really work for 60 or 70 hours per week.

China's youth are also shouldering much bigger  expectations than previous generations.

China began to open and reform its economy  in 1978, and since then has seen its Gross 

Domestic Product or GDP grow to become the second  largest in the world. This has led to significant 

improvements in citizens' access to health and  education – and more than 800 million people 

have been lifted out of poverty. But those  days of rapid growth are seemingly over.

Do you think there are unrealistic  expectations on young people from the 

older generation, your parents' generation? For the last 40 years China's economy is like  

rocketing. So I think even for me or for my  parents, they're expecting their lives to get 

better, and also their children, they can get a  better education and get better jobs. Right now 

everything is becoming unpredictable. Maybe your  children, they cannot lead a life better than you.

We could definitely link this wave of  quiet quitting and rethinking work, 

to an inherent lack of satisfaction with what  is out there in terms of job availability.

Yeah, I think is quite a long way to  go. Mainly because China has still a 

very large population. But I think as the  population is shrinking in China right now,  

I think maybe in the long future, we can see that  there's companies that will change their attitudes  

towards their employees. For the work culture to  shift I think maybe really take a long time.