Activism of No Action: The Lying Flat Movement in Chinese Cyberspace

• In Event: Digital Media, Repression and State Power

Abstract

How do societal actors engage in activism, articulate popular discontent and grievances with no actions on the digital platform? Previous studies on digital activism in authoritarian regimes tend to focus on how digital technologies have facilitated offline collective mobilization or how citizens have engaged in online activism to challenge state power, especially its control over online expression (e.g., Esarey and Xiao 2008; Meng 2011). However, in recent years, lying-flat (or tangping), a form of activism with no actions in China has increasingly caught media and public attention. Drawing on data collected through online ethnography on popular social media platforms, such as Weibo hashtags regarding lying-flat and related Zhihu questions, we unravel the origins and evolution of the lying-flat movement and imply how such non-active movement can become a form of activism that erodes the regime’s legitimacy.

After hand-coding more than 3,000 online posts, our preliminary analysis has revealed a more nuanced and dynamic picture of the “lying-flat” movement than previously understood. We find that the movement reflects a resistance to China’s overtime work culture (the notorious “996” work schedule), with many netizens blaming the capital (ziben), capitalists (zibenjia) and capitalism (ziben zhuyi) as the root cause. Some even blame the current socialism with Chinese characteristics which combines both socialist and capitalism economy. A nostalgia of Maoist pure communist life is cherished. That being said, some have implicitly or explicitly held the state and the regime accountable for not dealing with grievances appropriately. These two groups of mindsets, we argue, no matter accredit the lying-flat to capitalism-wise (who could be more left and loathing capitalism) or to regime-wise (who could be more right and countering the current authoritarian system), challenge the “hegemony of the market and the state” (Blecher 2002) and thus destabilize the legitimacy of the regime to some extent.

Being one of the few that take the first step to examine the lying-flat movement empirically and systematically, this study makes multi-folded contributions to current studies. First, beyond exploring the lying-flatism through merely a cultural lens (Su 2023), it states that the movement could, if not dealt with properly, pose a threat to the state as other confrontational activism. More broadly, it not only adds more innovating strategies to the repertoire of James Scott’s “everyday resistance” (1985) but also speaks to a body of growing scholarship that investigates “non-confrontational activism” (Wang 2019), “infrapolitics” (Scott 1985; Yang et al 2015) and “passive-aggressive resistance” (Duncan 2013). Particularly, on the spectrum of resistance, it introduces a less (or even non) confrontational form of resistance. In doing so, it helps enrich our understanding of China’s digital activism (e.g., Han 2018; Fang and Repnikova 2018). Finally, by decoding more nuances and dynamics of the movement, this study also suggests when scrutinizing activism we need to bring back the role of economic actors played as major targets of social protests, not just government actors, which echoes previous studies that examine the targets of social movements beyond a focus on the state (Dyke, Soule and Taylor 2004), particularly those targeting economic sectors (e.g., Ingram, Yue and Rao 2010).

Author

• Yuan Wang, Ripon College