It’s a heads-you-lose, tails-you-lose situation in the People’s Republic of China. And if Ethan Tuo is right, it’s going to get worse.
As we’ve been seeing, even those at the very top of the CCP power pyramid can be struck down at any time. (“The PLA purges are far more extensive than previously understood,” says ChinaPower.)
Ordinary people are not safe either, though they have a fair chance, at least in the near term, of avoiding official attention if they never see, say, or do anything other than what the authorities demand of them.
The list of things a Chinese person must do and not do is long. One thing he must not do is “lie flat.” Lack of ambition is very suspicious. It’s the kind of thing that foreign forces might foster (Vision Times, May 5, 2026).
China’s Ministry of State Security…has declared that young people’s refusal to work hard is a national security threat orchestrated by foreign forces. The accusation named no accounts, identified no funding, and cited no evidence. It did not need to. Political police do not require proof.
“Lying flat,” known in Chinese as tang ping, is a posture of deliberate disengagement: young people, exhausted by relentless pressure to work long hours, own property, marry, and reproduce, opt out. They work the minimum required, consume less, and refuse to compete. The movement spread virally on social media in the early 2020s as youth unemployment reached record highs and the economic promises of the previous generation evaporated for millions.
The Ministry of State Security’s article, published on its official channels, told Chinese youth that their exhaustion and disillusionment were manufactured abroad. Social media accounts and influencers promoting lying flat, the ministry claimed, were being amplified by foreign hands.
The author sees this episode as another instance in a years-long expansion of the purview claimed by the Ministry of State Security. “After Xi Jinping formally elevated ‘political security’ to the top of all security hierarchies in 2019, the Ministry of State Security began moving into sectors it had never formally controlled,” including higher education and the financial industry.
The China Securities Regulatory Commission, which oversees the country’s capital markets, quietly came under Ministry of State Security supervisory guidance. The financial sector, already battered by capital controls and politically motivated enforcement, began receiving direction from intelligence officers.
A career intelligence officer who has spent thirty years conducting surveillance, running informants, and detaining targets now guides the functioning of capital markets. He does not understand price-to-earnings ratios, liquidity risk, or monetary transmission mechanisms. He understands reading faces for signs of foreign allegiance and deciding who needs to be brought in for questioning. Placing people trained in that discipline inside financial institutions, universities, and media organizations substitutes political terror for professional judgment and dismantles a country’s ability to function from the inside.
One further detail has received insufficient attention. In recent years, large numbers of state enterprises, universities, and government offices have begun requiring employees to fill in their “family class origin,” a category last used systematically during the Cultural Revolution. Many younger workers do not know what it means; they assume it refers to parental occupation or income. It does not. “Family class origin” is the tool political police use to sort the population into categories of political reliability. Its reappearance is evidence that a classification-and-control system is being quietly rebuilt.
History is cycling. “The administrative expansion of political police has, without exception, preceded mass political terror. The triggering event can take many forms… Once that trigger fires, the system collapses to two conditions: compliance or destruction. There is no middle ground, no option of sitting it out, no position called ‘not involved.’ ” And, says the author, the Chinese people are running out of time.
Also see:
StoptheCCP.org: “Pretending to Work in China”
