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May 12, 2026 — 5:00am
China’s dictator Xi Jinping is due to receive Donald Trump, a much-diminished US president, in Beijing this week. Trump is being daily humiliated by Iran, as German Chancellor Friedrich Merz has observed.
So what does Xi have to worry about? Quite a bit, judging by the conduct of his regime.
One clue was the edict issued two weeks ago by China’s predominant spy agency, the Ministry of State Security. In a highly unusual move, it ventured into social commentary to instruct young people how to live their lives.
“May every young person uphold their original aspirations, stand firm on their principles, remain undisturbed by noise and unclouded by confusion, and thrive in the prime of their lives,” it said through a video including an AI-generated young officer in police uniform.
And why did the secret police feel the need to dispense life advice to “young comrades”, as they call them? The ministry’s statement denounced a phenomenon known as “lying flat” or “tang ping”. This is the common term for giving up on mainstream pathways of work and career, opting out of a hyper-competitive scramble in a post-COVID economic slump.
China’s youth find it hard to get jobs and, when they do, they find a “996 culture” where they’re expected to work from 9am to 9pm, six days a week. Even so, many despair of ever being able to afford a home or attain the prosperity of their parents’ generation. If the system rejects them, they reject the system, hence the catchphrase “lying flat is justice”. It’s increasingly common to return to the parental home in a trend known as “feeding off the oldies” or “kenlaozu”.
The situation has some resonance with today’s Australian concern about “intergenerational inequity”.
Xi Jinping himself first warned against “lying flat” in 2021 as a danger to the social order. His solution was to urge the youth to endure hardship. “Eat bitterness,” he told them. As he had done when sent to live in a cave in the countryside during Mao’s Cultural Revolution.
It seems Xi was not heeded. But, as the supreme leader cannot possibly admit failure, his spy agency has stepped in to blame hostile foreign forces. Because it frets that they’re being “brainwashed” by hostile foreign forces into opting out. “Anti-China forces are working hard to corrupt the minds of young people in China under the banner of ‘lying flat’,” the Ministry of State Security says.
These sinister forces, which go unnamed, supposedly fund various unnamed think tanks and social media in the hope that the flattened youth will “surrender our development dividends, strategic opportunities and the future of our nation”.
This intervention is, in the words of the keen China watcher and sinologist Geremie Barmé, “an extreme act of paternalism”. It’s as if, he adds, the regime is saying, “You are not smart enough to be alienated or decadent, you are a victim of someone else. We have raised the smartest, best educated generation in Chinese history and now we tell them they’re too stupid to lie flat.”
“It’s extraordinarily insulting,” Barmé adds.
Barmé, an Australian and founder of the ANU’s Australian Centre on China in the World, and now a New Zealand resident and publisher of China Heritage, doesn’t dispute that there are foreign intelligence agencies trying to recruit Chinese sources and agents. He notes that the CIA advertises publicly. But the notion that China’s youth are “lying flat” because of foreign forces is, he says, “ridiculous”. And, by painting them as possible agents of nefarious foreign forces, the government is implicitly threatening them.
Real blame lies in a failing economy. When youth unemployment topped 20 per cent in 2023, the authorities stopped publishing the statistic. They rejigged the series and relaunched it five months later with a much more palatable figure of 14.9 per cent. Problem solved, no? The current rate is 16.1 per cent. Officially.
The country’s real estate market crashed in 2020 and prices have continued to fall ever since, snapping the middle-class ladder to prosperity and exerting a deflationary pressure across the economy.
The government’s current official economic growth target of 4.5 to 5 per cent may look impressive, but for a country of China’s size and income level, it’s feeble. For the first time in 20 years, migrant workers who flocked to the cities in the hundreds of millions have started returning to their countryside villages of origin as opportunity evaporates.
“When the Chinese economy was doing well, growing at 10 per cent or so a year, working under pressure, by and large, delivered rewards,” says Steve Tsang of the SOAS China Institute in London, speaking to the Financial Times. “Not any longer. To those who practise [lying flat], the question they ask is, ‘What’s the point in working so very hard?’ ”
What does this campaign tell us about the Chinese Communist Party leadership? “It’s paranoid,” diagnoses Barmé. The regime cannot tolerate youth disengagement because it implies that the economy is failing, the society is dysfunctional or, worse, that the rising generation is staging an implicit political protest. Or all three. “It’s exactly the same paranoia you see in the purge of Xi’s generals.”
A Chinese court last week sentenced two former defence ministers to death, with a two-year stay of execution. The two ministers, both generals of the People’s Liberation Army, were found guilty of bribery. But, while Xi’s purge of the military is conducted on the grounds of corruption, it appears to be primarily about control.
In 2022, Xi named six generals to the pinnacle of military power, the Central Military Commission, which is chaired by Xi himself. Today, only one remains. The rest have been placed under investigation or disappeared. The one who remains is not a combat commander but a political commissar. So the commission now comprises just two people – Xi himself and a PLA lickspittle.
“Since 2022, over 100 senior PLA officers from virtually all areas of the armed forces have been swept aside or gone missing, amounting to an unprecedented purge of China’s military,” according to a February report by the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
One of the most striking aspects of this purge is that Xi is removing the very people he appointed. In Barmé’s words, “he built it, but he won’t own it”. And, with Xi at 72 years old after more than 10 years as party leader, “the paranoia is going to get worse because the leader is getting older”, Barmé predicts. It seems he has plenty to worry about, real or imagined.
Peter Hartcher is both international and political editor. His political column appears on Saturdays.
