(Published in ENRICH magazine, 2022)
THERE'S A "QUIET" REVOLUTION raging among youthful employees in two of the world's richest countries that might just change our deeply held views about working hard for the money and the primacy of work in our lives.
By some fantastic coincidence, a growing number of young adults in the United States and China -- the former a champion of corporate capitalism and the latter the bastion of state capitalism – are simultaneously protesting their exploitation by companies that pay them a pittance but demand they work almost to death to boost shareholder value.
Their protests, which began in early 2021 amid the raging COVID-19 pandemic, have gone viral both online and in the real world and show no signs of abating. Some call this phenomenon a resistance movement against wage slavery. Others refer to it as a spiritual rejection of workaholism (or work addiction) and the workaholic culture. Still others claim they're anti-work movements.
What exactly is happening in the disparate workplaces of America and China?
In the U.S., young employees fed-up with low pay and long hours have taken to protesting today's more rabid rat race by embracing "quiet quitting", or "quietting", while also disengaging from their companies.
These people just "coast along" and do enough so they don’t get fired as slackers. In this sense, they're somewhat similar to the Hippies of the 1960s that were their grandparents.
Quiet quitting is basically a loud protest by young Americans against workaholism, which today goes by the new epithet of "hustle culture". The main objective of quiet quitting is to pay more attention to one's mental health and personal well-being. Workaholism defeats this aim.
In China, disillusioned young workers have taken to "lying flat" ("tang ping"; 躺平), or have embraced its more extreme offshoot called "let it rot" ("bai lan"; 摆烂).
Young Chinese are doing this to protest the widespread and brutal "996" (jiǔ jiǔ liù) work-to-death culture in some companies that drives them to despair -- and sometimes suicide. An online post described lying flat (or lie flat) as a “new cultural movement of the new youth in a hundred years”.
Another called the movement “a silent protest to unfairness, often the result of structural and institutional factors that can no longer be altered by personal efforts”.
On the other hand, going bai lan means an employee must "actively embrace a deteriorating situation, rather than trying to turn it around". It means what you think it means: if the going gets tough, let it rot. The phrase has its origins in Chinese basketball where a team losing badly makes the decision to lose the game instead of mounting a furious rally to try to win.
Both tang ping and bai lan seek to restore the healthy work-life balance shattered by China's notorious workaholism culture. The young Chinese that bravely decide to go these routes seem to want to earn just enough to meet their physiological needs without undue and unwanted stress.
In both countries, these young people see no need for working above and beyond, especially in what's being called "bullshit jobs". Just do what the job demands. Period!
Quietters and anti-966ers don't want employers to earn tons of money from their doing extra work without extra pay while being treated as mindless money-making machines.
The mobile phone is the leading tool for employee oppression. Quietters have taken to not responding to voice calls and texts from their bosses to discuss work after they clock out at 5:00 p.m. or during Saturdays and Sundays. No more “pakiusap”.
They're doing the right thing so they can attain the duty to enjoy life outside the office and spend more time with their families. They also want their jobs to align more closely with their personal values. One working American mom put it succinctly: her kids don't care how great an employee she is; all they want is for her to be a great mom.
Employers are taking notice of quiet quitting but can't figure out if they should be sympathetic or punitive towards employees embracing these new forms of labor protest. Some U.S. companies, however, have resorted to "quiet firing" employees they believe are quiet quitters by making their office lives so miserable they quickly resign.
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| Tang ping and bai lan cats |
Dangerous "Dreams"
These twin protest movements imply a rejection of the "American Dream" and the "Chinese Dream" of prosperity through hard work. These dreams are now seen by more young people as tools worsening the massive income inequality and intractable inequities that are their daily lot.
The young reason that if the game is rigged against you, why play at all? Why not be like bench players on a professional basketball team that still get paid despite not playing as hard or as often as the team's superstars. Makes sense, right?
Employees that are Millennials (Gen Y, or those born from 1981 to 1996) and Zoomers (Gen Z, or those born from 1997 to 2012) are involved in this epic struggle to restore humanity in the workplace. The consequences of this fight for respect might profoundly affect the future nature of work in other capitalist economies such as the Philippines.
What's occurring in the U.S. and China is the latest take on the eternal "war" between employees and bosses, or between those that sweat and those that reap the rewards of this sweat.
Some countries in Europe have also been infected by the quiet quitting and tang ping viruses. It's unclear if these resistance movements will prosper to the levels they've attained in the U.S. and China, however.
What can't be denied is the repudiation of the idea that being a workaholic is both "good" and "necessary" for personal financial success. It seems there's a renewal of an old argument that people shouldn't be forced to sell their labor for the right to live decent lives. People aren't farm animals.
There must be alternative ways of working and living that employees and employers can agree upon that don't demand so much of employees' lives in return for so little reward. What this is, I don't know.
But the rise of work-from-home (WFH) or remote work, and hybrid work due to the pandemic might be a step in this direction. Hybrid work is a flexible work model combining in-office work with WFH.
It allows employees the autonomy to choose to work wherever and however they're most productive. The pandemic led to the popularity of both models as people reevaluated their jobs and careers.
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| Young Chinese lying flat |
Goodbye office
The waning of the pandemic threat in 2022, however, revealed that employees worldwide no longer want to go back to their offices. A survey released in April 2022 by the ADP Research Institute that provides labor market and employee performance research confirmed return-to-office mandates will drive Millennials and Zoomers to quit their jobs.
It showed that 64% of the global workforce has already, or is considering, looking for new jobs if their employers order them back to the office full-time. The same resistance to full-time office work has manifested in the Philippines.
This rejection of in-office work persists in the U.S. The results of survey conducted by U.S. business intelligence firm Morning Consult and released in September 2022 revealed that four in 10 employed adults said they'd rather quit their job than return to an office full-time. Six in 10 said they’re more likely to apply for a job with a WFH option.
In the meantime, we're stuck with the phenomenon of quiet quitting, tang ping and bai lan. These protests don't seem to have the makings of a short-term trend that will disappear when world economies rev-up in a few years' time. The fuse has been lit and that's what matters.
Made in China
In April 2021, a Chinese employee named Luo Huazhong published an innocuous post entitled "Lying Flat is Justice" in the online forum, Baidu Tieba.
Posting under the username "Kind-Hearted Traveler", Luo said he had chosen to live a minimalist lifestyle in his home town of Jiande in eastern Zhejiang Province. He said he quit his factory job in 2016 and spent the next few years wandering around China. He survives by doing odd jobs, subsisting on $60 a month from his savings and eating two meals a day.
An apparent lover of Western philosophy, Luo waxed philosophical in his Baidu Tieba post. Here are his original comments in full:
“I have not been working for two years, just having fun and don’t see anything wrong in it. Pressure mainly comes from people around you who position and compete with you. It also comes from the values of the older generation.
“All sorts of pressures keep popping up before you all the time. Every time you search for a popular news, it is all about romances and pregnancies etc. of celebrities in ‘procreative surrounding’ (生育周边), as if some ‘invisible creatures’ (看不见的生物) are creating a kind of thinking and pressure on you.
“But we don’t have to be like this. I can just sleep in the sun in my wooden bucket like Diogenes, or I can live in a cave like Heraclitus and think about ‘logos’, since this land has never had a school of thought that exalts human subjectivity, I can develop one of my own. Lying flat is my wise movement. Only through lying flat, can humans measure up to things.”
This thoughtful post triggered the lying flat movement; created the “philosophy” called “lying flat-ism” and ordained Luo as the “lying flat master”. It also took the working Chinese youth by storm and angered China’s communist masters who saw it as subverting the officially sanctioned Chinese Dream movement.
Lying flat soon became a buzzword among the masses and the Communist Party of China (CPC) moved quickly to quell its popularity. The CPC removed Luo's original Tieba post that had over 10,000 followers. It ordered online platforms to "strictly restrict" posts about tang ping. Searches for tang ping on the Chinese internet now yield no results.
The CPC also banned the online sales of tang ping-branded merchandise such as the hugely popular lie flat cat cartoons on T-shirts, bags, keychains and other items, calling them subversive.
In May 2021 or less than a month after Luo posted on Tieba, Xinhua (China's official propaganda arm) published an editorial assailing lying flat as “shameful” and a “poisonous chicken soup”. In October, CPC secretary general Xi Jinping called for "avoiding 'involution' (nei juan) and 'lying flat'" in an article published in the CPC journal Qiushi.
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| Let it rot |
Modern slavery
Life is tough in China, especially for young adults. Oddities in Chinese society mean many young people can't afford to marry, have children, buy car and own a home due a combination of paltry salaries and way too expensive items.
Young people have to bear the “burden of the three mountains” -- education, healthcare and housing -- while taking care of their elderly parents and in-laws. Most Chinese are struggling to stay afloat, especially with the continuing series of pandemic lockdowns, droughts, floods and an economic downturn threatening recession.
Premier Li Keqiang revealed that “China has over 600 million people whose monthly income is barely 1,000 yuan ($140) and their lives have further been affected by the coronavirus pandemic.” That’s four in 10 Chinese. In March 2021, Li said over 200 million Chinese hold “flexijobs”, which is official-speak for a person working two jobs at a time to make ends meet.
Overworking in China hit new lows when the brutal 996 working hour system came into vogue over the past decade. The number 996 means employees work from 9:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m., 6 days every week for a total of 72 crushing hours per week. Free time has become non-existent.
The most notorious champions of 996 are Alibaba co-founder Jack Ma, who infamously called 996 a "huge blessing," and Richard Liu, founder and CEO of JD.com, one of China's two top B2C online retailers. Liu, the "Jeff Bezos of China", has been blasted for saying employees that avoid 996 are nothing more than slackers.
Employees committing suicide because they couldn't cope with the brutal pace of overworking demanded by 996 turned Chinese public opinion against the practice. In August 2021, the 996 working hour system was declared illegal by the Supreme People's Court.
It was also criticized as a violation of Chinese Labor Law since employees are only allowed to extend work hours by up to three hours for special reasons. The law says employees should not work more than 36 extra hours in a month.
The 996 culture keeps being attacked by Chinese as "modern slavery". The practice continues, however, due to lax government enforcement of the law.
Born in the USA
Quiet quitting began as a unique American phenomenon and was born out of the de facto massive labor strike otherwise called "The Great Resignation". Oddly, The Great Resignation or The Big Quit was recognized for what it was -- an unprecedented wave of nationwide mass resignations -- in April 2021. This was the same month Luo published his lying flat post that ignited China's lying flat movement.
In April, demographers reported a record four million Americans quit their jobs. By July 2022, that huge number had swollen to 11.2 million. The number of vacancies peaked at 11.9 million in March 2022.
Quiet quitting is more akin to tang ping, which is a rejection of societal pressures to overwork. In quiet quitting, an employee does only what his job demands and nothing more. It's also been described as "acting your wage". Quiet quitting is believed to have been inspired by the tang ping movement.
The word quitting in quiet quitting doesn't refer to an employee resigning his job. It means employees are "quitting" going the extra mile for the company without pay, and refusing to do jobs and overtime they're not being paid for.
People aren't farm animals. Neither are they mindless money-making machines.
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| The Chinese cat symbolizing lying flt |
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