Posted on 07/04/2021 10:12:32 AM PDT by springwater13
Fed up with work stress, Guo Jianlong quit a newspaper job in Beijing and moved to China’s mountain southwest to “lie flat.”
Guo joined a small but visible handful of Chinese urban professionals who are rattling the ruling Communist Party by rejecting grueling careers for a “low-desire life.” That is clashing with the party’s message of success and consumerism as its celebrates the 100th anniversary of its founding.
Guo, 44, became a freelance writer in Dali, a town in Yunnan province known for its traditional architecture and picturesque scenery. He married a woman he met there.
“Work was OK, but I didn’t like it much,” Guo said. “What is wrong with doing your own thing, not just looking at the money?”
“Lying flat” is a “resistance movement” to a “cycle of horror” from high-pressure Chinese schools to jobs with seemingly endless work hours, novelist Liao Zenghu wrote in Caixin, the country’s most prominent business magazine.
“In today’s society, our every move is monitored and every action criticized,” Liao wrote. “Is there any more rebellious act than to simply ‘lie flat?’”
(Excerpt) Read more at apnews.com ...
This isn’t the Howard Stern Show.
>I’m absolutely no expert in the Japanese language, but I think they have a word spelled in Romaji as karoshi which is supposed to mean death from overworking.
Karoshi they are dealing with slowly. The Japanese gov’t started labeling companies that overwork their workers as “black kigyou.” They problem then became that NHK, the government’s media outlet, had a young female reporter that they worked for months with one or two days off a month who died of overwork, so the government itself became a “black kigyou” or “black corporation.”
Hikikomori, on the other hand, is a reaction to how restrictive and encapsulating Japanese culture is to young Japanese. They rebel against the entrance exams and, though most people don’t know this, the fact that your junior year of college is spent looking for a job, which eventually becomes the career that you spend the rest of your life working (and never working anywhere else).
The Chinese element seems to be more of a rebellion against the social status and monitoring, but there are some elements of the Japanese model in there. The other big issue is that the Chinese government is pushing China into a white-collar economy when its history of success comes almost entirely from blue-collar work.
The blue-collar work of decades ago was the way to escape the grinding poverty of rural areas, but now with that nearly gone, all Chinese youth want white-collar jobs that are still quite rare, but don’t want to “settle” for blue-collar jobs that would trap them in a factory for decades.
This is a massive problem for the CCP, because Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, and surrounding areas of SE Asia are quickly willing to absorb those blue-collar jobs and there’s little demands for new white-collar work in China. You have a workforce that mostly can’t go one way (white-collar) and refuses to go the other (blue-collar). Over the next few years this tension will increase and the government will attempt to do something about it (probably forcing “lay-downs” into blue collar work by force, which will result in bigger rebellions, which will result in greater force.
By 2025, China should be feeling a lot of stress as SE Asia begins to strip GDP from China.
>This is going to be a huge problem for the CCP. My suggestion is that they look somewhere for a colony.
I think that China will begin to “invest” in SE Asia and then “Colonizing” it, as they need cheap labor to counter China leaving a blue-collar economy.
It could end up something like how China is investing in Africa to isolate resources to something almost like the Japanese rule over Manchuria.
Soon these people will find themselves in the PLA.
—
Most of them are so far out of shape they’d never make it to the induction center. Only a few actually exercise.
They have ways.
Into the ground
Like an old golf ball
Teed up
For an American-made driver
TRUMP!
China continues to rot from the inside out. Infrastructure, buildings, people...
—
They just keep building more buildings when the demand increases; they tear down the old or evict people in farm lands and build more apartment buildings. Apartments are a secure form of investment there; everyone buys one or more, then rents them out at a loss for a few years, then sells for a tidy profit. No one wants to invest in their stock market after the huge crash several years back - many families never recovered.
Any “writer” willing to retreat into the “mountains” wanted off the social credit grid first, and everything else after...
1964? Some Indian dude named Gautama discovered this about 460 B.C. He is better known today as Buddha.
t almost sounds like it is year 1964 over there and the Chinese hippy movement has discovered Henry David Theoreau.
—
No. Not that. The average apartment costs US$1.5 million. They get loans from anywhere they can, but young people just see it as a rat race they cannot win, so they relax and lie down - the CCP hates this and has scrubbed all references off the internet.
Lying flat - China’s Silent Revolution
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWl7njLlXLU
It also has some relevance to us as well. A lot of people opt out of high pressure careers to devote more time to their families, and that's becoming more common now with the mandatory wokeness and political correctness. People who would do anything to become doctors or lawyers in their twenties would do anything to get out in their fifties.
We have an ambivalence about success, celebrating achievement, dedication, and self discipline but deploring the ruthlessness and compromises that often go with material success.
Who’s going to eat General Tso’s Chicken?
This is going to be a huge problem for the CCP. My suggestion is that they look somewhere for a colony.
—
The CCP is looking at the US. They covet our clean air, water and soil. The plan is to release a genetic bio-weapon to kill off 200 million Americans, then move millions of Han Chinese to the former USA. Simple - covid was just a data gathering exercise.
Those Gen Z Chin-lee would never accept a republic or even a raw democracy (which China most certainly is not); but the promise of a Marxist counter-revolution, like Mao's Cultural Revolution but one cleverly planned Collective with the terminal point to smash surveillance and unravel Peking, make it unlivable to the CCP and PLA, starting with HK-style quiet marches quickly ramped up to guerilla-style out-of-control mayhem, well gosh pop the popcorn.
“The Chinese element seems to be more of a rebellion against the social status and monitoring”
—
Its worse - its not the spying its the coat of living is so huge - to marry a man must own property, so men buy apartments averaging $1.5 million - there is nothing cheaper. Then he can get married and have a lucrative investment at the same time. But they have to buy more apartments to get ahead which become too prohibitive with supporting their parents, grand parents, the wife, the kids, her parents and grand parents. So they are just giving up.
—
“The blue-collar work of decades ago was the way to escape the grinding poverty of rural areas, but now with that nearly gone, all Chinese youth want white-collar jobs that are still quite rare, but don’t want to “settle” for blue-collar jobs that would trap them in a factory for decades.”
—
The CCP just decided they did not have numerically enough vocational people with degrees, so they fixed the problem by changing all academic degrees to vocational this year. Now the students cannot get a white collar job since all those jobs require a college degree. Naturally there have been huge riots - brutally suppressed riots with the usual beatings, deaths, imprisonments, disappearances.
One more instance of the CCP identifying a problem where none exists, then fixing it by creating a worse problem.
Not for a mass drafting, an action which would destroy the CCP forever.
Who’s going to eat General Tso’s Chicken?
—
You will since no one in China eat it now.
You eat General Tso’s Chicken!
“ Not so different from the lying low that Russians and Eastern Europeans did under Communism.”
I met a Czech surgeon that was on the path to work at the university hospital in Prague but decided to take a position in a smaller town, Plzen, because good beer was more available there, and he didn’t have to kiss so much ass of the kommissars and superiors.
We met at a beer hall there, and it probably wasn’t as coincidental as it seems.
Urqvell Rules!!!!!!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.