Videos with the hashtag quiet quitting have racked up more than 150 million
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.