He plans to live on 10,000 yuan (US$1,455) per month until he turns 30, instead of pursuing a higher paying job that would allow him to buy a home and start a family.

“I’m basically, mostly lying flat if you define that as not struggling to move ahead like by working overtime,” he said.

Li could work overtime in his company of 3,000 employees to have a shot at getting a promotion plus a pay rise – but there is no guarantee.

“I don’t have much confidence in the economy,” he added.

What is ‘lying flat’, and why are Chinese officials standing up to it?

Li is in good company, and not only in China, with an ever growing number of younger people resenting the idea of struggling against a host of economic problems that emerged during the coronavirus pandemic.

In the United States now too, millions are leaning more towards the life side of a work-life balance, in part because of pandemic-driven shifts in the national economy.

Morgan Healey, 22, from New York City obtained a cognitive neuroscience degree from Brown University last year and initially intended to work in medicine or pursue a higher degree.

But Healey instead travelled to Pokhara in central Nepal having previously worked prior as an emergency medical technician in South Africa for around three months.

The Indonesian island of Bali was next on the itinerary, but after that, anything is possible.

“They call it ‘gap year’, but it’s the gap to what? Let me be clear, I have no idea what’s coming next,” Healey said.

“At a place like Brown, you get a lot of ambitious kids. They go straight for the money. I’m so proud of them, but they’re going back to where I was born and I’ve already done that.”

In the US before the coronavirus pandemic, preferences were easing away from traditional jobs to less labour-intensive online work, the American business consultancy Sumus said in a 2022 study.

In 2021 alone, more than 47 million Americans voluntarily left their jobs in an “unprecedented mass exit”, the Harvard Business Review found in a study last year. Some had lost jobs a year before, giving them time at home to re-evaluate their futures.

“Despite some differences between China and the US, there are some similarities between American and Chinese youth in lying flat and quietly quitting, as well as many people just leaving the labour force entirely,” said Mary Gallagher, professor of democracy, democratisation and human rights at the University of Michigan.

“I think this stems from a general pessimism among today’s young people who feel that their economic prospects are not very good, the world is at war and in full of conflict, and also climate change and environmental disasters are an increasing stress.”

Economic woes from Covid-19 controls to crackdowns on technology and property firms have also made it harder to get prime jobs around China. Slowing economic growth comes as a further deterrent.

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Fewer jobs and less pay: Chinese migrant workers continue to face uncertainty after country reopens

Fewer jobs and less pay: Chinese migrant workers continue to face uncertainty after country reopens

“The trend predates Covid, though it found its clearest expression as a meme during the pandemic,” said Barclay Bram, a fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute’s Centre for China Analysis.

“The sense that society is unfair and that the herculean effort required to build a successful life amid so much competition is not really worth it is going to remain prevalent unless something drastic changes,” Bram said.

“Ultimately, China is no longer experiencing the meteoric growth that previous generations experienced, so young people today have to find ways to recalibrate their expectations and find meaning even given this new reality.”

Fears over lying flat in China got so bad that in October 2021, President Xi Jinping issued a public condemnation, with his words addressing a trend that threatens to strike at the very heart of his “Chinese dream” ideology, which he has described as the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation”.

Xi said in comments published by the Communist Party’s flagship journal on political theory, Qiushi, that involution and lying flat must be avoided to “prevent the stagnation of the social class, unblock the channels for upwards social mobility, create opportunities for more people to become rich, and form an environment for improvement in which everyone participates”.

“I’m sure Xi Jinping has a distaste for young people slacking off,” said Dexter Roberts, a senior fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Indo-Pacific Security Initiative, who previously lived in Beijing.

In a May 2021 survey by Chinese microblogging platform Weibo, 67,000 respondents said they were “tired” and would “lie flat”, while just 11,000 said they would “forge ahead” instead.

“It’s just that they have lost interest in making efforts to move up or get pay rises,” said Chen Zhiwu, chair professor of finance at the University of Hong Kong.

“They feel hopeless and so on, so lying flat is one way out.”

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Pluto Mo, a Beijing native in her 20s, is living for brief spurts this year in various cities as a photographer’s assistant and receptionist for hotels and travel agencies.

“I’m not going to let high desire hijack my life, like buying a house, car, or starting a family,” said Mo, who as of late February was living in Dali, a city in southwest China.

Her rent – to live between a lake and a snow-capped mountain – and meals come to around 3,000 yuan per month and she has just 20,000 yuan put away for emergencies.

“I don’t want to budget for buying a house or a car,” Mo said.

“After getting up, I open the door and go for a walk, buy a bun, and then walk back. During the day, everyone chats and drinks coffee, and at night, we sing together, and then rest and sleep. Although I may not be that rich financially, the overall gain may be more for my life.”

“It’s pretty clear if you get out of the university in China and look for work, the platform companies don’t have as many jobs as there used to be,” said Andrew Collier, China economist with Global Source Partners in Hong Kong.

“It’s similar to the US, where the tech sector is no longer the golden goose for college graduates. I think there are parallels.”

Americans are shunning blue-collar jobs because of the pay and sometimes the working conditions, the Harvard Business Review report said, as some would rather focus more on family, retire early or seek adventure.

Taking a gap year between a formal education and an entry-level job has become more accepted over the years in the US, said Holly Bull, president of the gap-year consultancy, Centre for Interim Programmes.

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American millennials and generation Z are becoming known for their focus on social media and “innovative technology”, the Sumus study said.

It says they are looking for “atypical” jobs in emerging industries including the gig economy – also called sharing economy or access economy where people earn income providing on-demand work, services or goods often through a digital platform like an app or website – as “compatible with their priorities”.

For the Centre for Interim Programmes, one of America’s oldest gap-year consultancies, applications reached a total of 520 over the past three years.

Americans, especially between the ages of 18 and 22, went for long-term adventures and short-term work programmes during the early days of the coronavirus to escape a dreary job market and visit countries that still had open borders, Bull said.

Other clients opted for gap years to re-evaluate their lives while making sense of nonstop social media content on climate, politics and the economy, she added.

“These students just need time to regroup, rejuvenate and step back from the pandemic pressures and resocialise,” Bull said.

“There are higher levels of anxiety in American youth now that we did not have in the past.”

Anya Moore, 18, who hails from the US state of Oregon, has been planning a post-high school gap year since hearing stories of her parents doing the same when younger.

But she too is responding to barrages of bad news, particularly on climate. A wildfire in 2020 nearly burned through her hometown where annual rainfall and heat patterns have been shifting.

Moore received clearance from Wellesley College to defer her first semester to late 2024 and is now planning travels that will involve “climate justice” – perhaps in Ecuador – and a visit to the UN Climate Change Conference in Dubai at the end of 2023.

“Sometimes I have that feeling of helplessness and I think taking the time out to make an impact will help me overcome that sense of despair,” she said.

“Sometimes it seems futile to be studying for a maths test or some assignment that doesn’t feel like it has real world applications.”

In the long run, lying flat could not only affect Chinese consumption and economic growth, but lower the birth rate that is already eating up the country’s demographic dividend and threatening its social welfare system, according to Dr Gavin Chiu Sin-hin, an independent UK-based commentator.

“China has not yet entered the stage of developed countries, and the competition for personal survival and pursuit of wealth is essentially fierce,” said Chiu, who is a former associate professor at Shenzhen University.

“On the other hand, Chinese society is already facing a serious problem of ageing before it gets rich.”

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Lying flat reflects young people’s resistance to the current social and economic system but also makes the country harder to avoid the middle-income trap, Chiu added.

Not everyone, though, is lying flat.

College-age Americans such as Moore expect their gap years to pay off in terms of non-academic education, while, in China, some people needed to make money as soon as Covid-19 controls eased in December.

Nicholas Ho, 38, returned to teaching maths and English in Guangzhou last year as he had done for three years, although he initially considered travelling abroad.

He has got rent, his father’s cancer treatment bills and three dogs to look after. He lost three months of pay from the tutoring centre because of Covid-19 lapses in business.

“I have enough money now, and I need to work because I work in a tutoring centre and children come and I have to teach,” Ho said.