Five years ago, Luo Huazhong discovered that he enjoyed doing nothing. He quit his job as a factory worker in China, biked 1,300 miles from Sichuan Province to Tibet and decided he could get by on odd jobs and $60 a month from his savings. He called his new lifestyle “lying flat.”

五年前，骆华忠发现自己很享受无所事事。他辞去了工厂工人的工作，从四川省骑行2000多公里到西藏，并决定靠打零工和每月从积蓄中拿出约400元过活。他管自己的新生活方式叫“躺平”。

“I have been chilling,” Mr. Luo, 31, wrote in a blog post in April, describing his way of life. “I don’t feel like there’s anything wrong.”

“两年多没有工作了，都在玩，”31岁的骆华忠在4月的一篇博客文章中描述了自己的生活方式。“没觉得哪里不对。”

He titled his post “Lying Flat Is Justice,” attaching a photo of himself lying on his bed in a dark room with the curtains drawn. Before long, the post was being celebrated by Chinese millennials as an anti-consumerist manifesto. “Lying flat” went viral and has since become a broader statement about Chinese society.

他给帖子取的标题是《躺平即是正义》，并附上了一张自己在拉着窗帘的黑漆漆房间里躺在床上的照片。不久，这篇文章被中国千禧一代奉为反消费主义宣言。“躺平”在网上走红，并成为关于中国社会的一个更广泛的陈述。

A generation ago, the route to success in China was to work hard, get married and have children. The country’s authoritarianism was seen as a fair trade-off as millions were lifted out of poverty. But with employees working longer hours and housing prices rising faster than incomes, many young Chinese fear they will be the first generation not to do better than their parents.

对上一代人来说，在中国，人生的成功意味着努力工作、结婚生子。随着数百万人摆脱贫困，该国的威权主义被视为一种公平的交易。但随着员工工作时间越来越长，房价上涨速度快于收入，许多中国年轻人担心他们将成为第一代不能超越父母的人。

They are now defying the country’s long-held prosperity narrative by refusing to participate in it.

他们现在通过拒绝努力来挑战该国长期以来的繁荣叙事。

Mr. Luo’s blog post was removed by censors, who saw it as an affront to Beijing’s economic ambitions. Mentions of “lying flat” — tangping, as it’s known in Mandarin — are heavily restricted on the Chinese internet. An official counternarrative has also emerged, encouraging young people to work hard for the sake of the country’s future.

骆华忠的帖子被审查员删除，他们认为这是对中国政府经济雄心的侮辱。“躺平”二字的提及在中国互联网上受到严格的限制。官方的反驳叙事也出现了，鼓励年轻人为了国家的未来而努力工作。

“After working for so long, I just felt numb, like a machine,” Mr. Luo said in an interview. “And so I resigned.”

“就做久了，整个人感觉麻木了，像机器一样，”骆华忠在接受采访时说。“然后我就辞职了。”

To lie flat means to forgo marriage, not have children, stay unemployed and eschew material wants such as a house or a car. It is the opposite of what China’s leaders have asked of their people. But that didn’t bother Leon Ding.

躺平意味着放弃婚姻、不生孩子、不找工作和避开诸如房子或车子之类的物质需求。这与中国领导人要求其人民所做的相反。但利昂·丁（Leon Ding，音）并不在乎。

Mr. Ding, 22, has been lying flat for almost three months and thinks of the act as “silent resistance.” He dropped out of a university in his final year in March because he didn’t like the computer science major his parents had chosen for him.

22岁的利昂·丁已经躺平近三个月，认为这种行为是“无声的抵抗”。3月，他在大学的最后一年辍学，因为他不喜欢父母为他选择的计算机科学专业。

After leaving school, Mr. Ding used his savings to rent a room in Shenzhen. He tried to find a regular office job but realized that most positions required him to work long hours. “I want a stable job that allows me to have my own time to relax, but where can I find it?” he said.

离校后，利昂·丁用积蓄在深圳租房。他试图找到一份普通的办公室工作，但发现大多数职位都需要他长时间工作。“我想要一份稳定的工作，让我有自己的时间放松，但上哪找呢？”他说。

Mr. Ding thinks young people should work hard for what they love, but not “996” — 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week — as many employers in China expect. Frustrated with the job search, he decided that “lying flat” was the way to go.

利昂·丁认为年轻人应该为自己喜欢的事情努力工作，而不是“996”——早9点到晚9点，每周六天——这是许多中国雇主所期望的。他对找工作感到沮丧，决定“躺平”是正确的做法。

“To be honest, it feels really comfortable,” he said. “I don’t want to be too hard on myself.”

“说实话我躺得还真的挺舒服的，”他说。“我觉得不想让自己那么辛苦。”

To make ends meet, Mr. Ding gets paid to play video games and has minimized his spending by doing things like cutting out his favorite bubble tea. Asked about his long-term plans, he said: “Come back and ask me in six months. I only plan for six months.”

为了维持生计，利昂·丁通过打游戏挣钱，并最大限度地减少支出，例如戒掉他最喜欢的珍珠奶茶。当被问及他的长期计划时，他说：“可能要半年之后再问我，我是半年一想。”

While plenty of Chinese millennials continue to adhere to the country’s traditional work ethic, “lying flat” reflects both a nascent counterculture movement and a backlash against China’s hypercompetitive work environment.

虽然许多中国千禧一代继续坚持该国的传统职业伦理，但“躺平”既反映了新生的反主流文化运动，也反映了对中国竞争激烈的工作环境的反击。

Xiang Biao, a professor of social anthropology at Oxford University who focuses on Chinese society, called tangping culture a turning point for China. “Young people feel a kind of pressure that they cannot explain and they feel that promises were broken,” he said. “People realize that material betterment is no longer the single most important source of meaning in life.”

专门研究中国社会的牛津大学社会人类学教授项彪称，躺平文化是中国的转折点。“就是年轻人他感觉到这种压力，一种解释不清楚的东西，感到这种承诺打破了，”他说。“人们意识到物质上的改善不再是唯一重要的人生意义所在。”

The ruling Communist Party, wary of any form of social instability, has targeted the “lying flat” idea as a threat to stability in China. Censors have deleted a tangping group with more than 9,000 members on Douban, a popular internet forum. The authorities also barred posts on another tangping forum with more than 200,000 members.

执政的共产党对任何形式的社会不稳定都怀着警惕，将“躺平”的想法视为对中国稳定的威胁。审查人员删除了豆瓣（一个流行的互联网论坛）上9000多人的“躺平”小组。当局还禁止另一个拥有超过20万名成员的“躺平”论坛发贴。

In May, China’s internet regulator ordered online platforms to “strictly restrict” new posts on tangping, according to a directive obtained by The New York Times. A second directive required e-commerce platforms to stop selling clothes, phone cases and other merchandise branded with “tangping.”

根据《纽约时报》获得的一份监管通知，今年5月，中国互联网监管机构命令网络平台“严控”关于“躺平”的新话题。另一项指令要求电子商务平台停止销售带有“躺平”标记的衣服、手机壳和其他商品。

The state news media has called tangping “shameful,” and a newspaper warned against “lying flat before getting rich.” Yu Minhong, a prominent billionaire, urged young people not to lie down, because “otherwise who can we rely on for the future of our country?”

官方新闻媒体称“躺平可耻”，一家报纸警告不要“未富先躺”。著名亿万富翁俞敏洪呼吁年轻人不要躺下，否则“国家的未来靠谁做”。

Mr. Luo decided to write about tangping after he saw people heatedly discussing China’s latest census results in April and calls for the country to address a looming demographic crisis by having more babies.

今年4月，骆华忠看到人们热烈讨论中国最新的人口普查结果，并呼吁中国通过多生孩子来解决迫在眉睫的人口危机，于是他决定写一篇关于“躺平”的文章。

He described his original “lying flat” blog post as “an inner monologue from a man living at the bottom of the society.”

他把自己最初的“躺平”博文描述为“一个底层男人的内心独白”。

“Those people who say lying down is shameful are shameless,” he said. “I have the right to choose a slow lifestyle. I didn’t do anything destructive to society. Do we have to work 12 hours a day in a sweatshop, and is that justice?”

“我觉得说躺平是可耻的人才是无耻的，”他说。“我有选择自己慢节奏生活的权力。它不会对社会产生产生什么破坏性的东西。一定要在血汗工厂每天上12个小时这样倒班才是正义的吗？”

Mr. Luo was born in rural Jiande County, in eastern Zhejiang Province. In 2007, he dropped out of a vocational high school and started working in factories. One job involved working 12-hour shifts at a tire factory. By the end of the day, he had blisters all over his feet, he said.

骆华忠出生在东部浙江省建德县农村。2007年，他从职高辍学，开始在工厂工作。其中一份工作是在一家轮胎厂做12个小时轮班。他说，一天下来，他的脚上都起了泡。

In 2014, he found a job as a product inspector in a factory but didn’t like it. He quit after two years and took on the occasional acting gig to make ends meet. (In 2018, he played a corpse in a Chinese movie by, of course, lying flat.)

2014年，他在一家工厂找到了一份产品检查员的工作，但他并不喜欢。两年后他辞职了，为了维持生计，他偶尔接一些表演的工作。（2018年，他在一部中国电影中饰演一具尸体，当然，是躺平的。）

Today, he lives with his family and spends his days reading philosophy and news and working out. He said it was an ideal lifestyle, allowing him to live minimally and “think and express freely.” He encourages his followers, who call him “the Master of Lying Down,” to do the same.

如今，他和家人住在一起，每天读哲学看新闻，锻炼身体。他说这是一种理想的生活方式，能让他维持最低限度的生活，同时“自由地思考和表达”。他鼓励他的追随者们也这样做，他们称他为“躺平大师”。

After hearing about Mr. Luo’s tangping post on a Chinese podcast, Zhang Xinmin, 36, was inspired to write a song about it.

36岁的张新民（音）在一个中文播客上听到骆华忠的“躺平”帖子后，受到启发，写了一首歌。

Mr. Zhang, a musician based in Wuhan, had quit his job in advertising five years ago to pursue his music, and the idea of lying flat resonated with him. He called his song “Tangping Is the Right Way.”

张新民是武汉的一名音乐人，五年前辞去广告业的工作，开始追求音乐事业，他对“躺平”的想法产生了共鸣。他把这首歌叫做《躺平是王道》。

Mr. Zhang uploaded the song to his social media platforms on June 3, and within a day censors had deleted it from three websites. He was furious.

6月3日，张新民将这首歌上传到自己的社交媒体平台上，一天之内，审查人员就从三个网站上删除了这首歌。他非常愤怒。

“Nowadays, only running forward is allowed, but not lying down,” he said. “It doesn’t make sense to me that they deleted this song.”

“现在只允许奔跑，不允许躺平，”他说。“我觉得删除这首歌没有道理。”

He eventually uploaded the song as a video on YouTube, which is blocked in China. The video shows him lying down on his sofa, casually strumming his guitar as he sings in a breezy voice:

最后，他将这首歌作成视频，上传到被中国屏蔽的YouTube。在视频里，他躺在沙发上，漫不经心地拨弄着吉他，用轻快的声音唱着：