Let it Rot.

“Begging the youth to end this rebellion…” Xi Jinping, not a quote but a message to the youth of China.

The People of China

“Let it rot (Bai lan)”, is slang to actively embrace a deteriorating situation instead of trying to fix it, often reflecting a sense of resignation or giving up on improvement.

“Lay flat (tang ping) “, another popular modern slang term, tang ping, literally meaning ‘lying flat’. It has cultural connotations of rejecting societal pressure and choosing a low-desire, low-effort lifestyle.

Dissatisfaction

An undercurrent of dissatisfaction is running through the youth of China. In a way it is a rebellion, not one of open dissent but one of individual choice, the choice to let it rot or lay flat. When the garbage isn’t collected, we all notice, we notice more when it goes on for more than a week. We know the council will do something about it and clean it up. Not so when the garbage is figurative. Lay flat is an individual choosing not to succumb to societal pressure to get a job, find a spouse, have children, buy a house, then support the council and government.

If your future looks challenging with obstacles beyond your ability to overcome, what choices do you have. If there was hope of finding a partner, you would do all you can to woo someone. In China men outnumber women in 2025 by 25.6 million. A ratio of 104.3 males to every 100 females.

Letting it Rot

Societal expectations are ignored. One or two million people who decide to let it rot, by lying flat will not affect the economy of China, with a population of 1.2 billion. However, there are many millions more who are dissatisfied, so many that the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) have noticed the impact the “let it rot movement” has upon the economy. Men being outnumbered by women is one reason, but women themselves have their own reasons to join the movement. CCP cannot stamp out this movement by force as has happened in the past. The enemy of the CCP is an attitude, an attitude by the people to just not care about societal expectations.

Deflation

The basic rule of economics is supply and demand. If supply increases without a corresponding increase in demand, prices drop. If demand outstrips supply, prices rise. According to one economist China is in a deflationary period. The reason there's deflation is because the demand has dropped significantly. People and businesses are not spending much in China. The ambition for businesses to excel has been crushed by CCP.

Trump’s Tariffs

 Lower prices are good for consumers, but long-term deflation reduces spending and investment, hurting the economy. Trump's latest tariffs on goods from China will hurt the Chinese economy even more. The USA is China’s largest customer by far. A 125% tariff imposed by Trump on all goods coming from China reduces demand for those goods in America. Thousands of small Chinese businesses who rely on the export market for income, suffer a double blow when their domestic market is stagnant due to the “let it rot” attitude.

Crushing Good Business

November 16th, 1993, New Oriental Education, a private educational services company, was founded in China. It started seeing massive success, so much so that it even became the largest provider of private educational services in China. It even was listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2006 and on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in 2020. The private tutoring sector was getting established in the 1990s, and some of the biggest players were spending so quickly they started issuing shares. In fact, before even getting listed New Oriental in 2004, reported that the size of the education market in China was approximately 580 billion RMB or about $72 billion. The tutoring market was booming, and it provided an enormous number of jobs. Estimates even suggested that China's lucrative tutoring industry once employed about 10 million people.

What CCP did to this industry in 2021 shocked the entire world. It erased billions of dollars of wealth from the markets. Companies lost 80 to 90% of their value, 10s of thousands of employees lost their jobs, and it destroyed an entire $100 billion industry. Tutoring companies could no longer list on the stock exchange or raise capital.

Tech Sector.

Similarly, even the gaming industry almost got killed by Chinese regulations in 2019 trying to pass laws limiting minors to less than one and a half hours of online gaming on weekdays, 3 hours on weekends, and no gaming between 10:00 PM and 8:00 AM. They even capped how much kids could spend on in game items with limits depending on their age.

In 2023, China's video games regulators screw it up again. New rules for online games triggered a massive sell off in gaming stocks. The market value of companies like Tencent and others, lost over $80 billion in market value on the same day after CCP’s announcement.

Mums and dads, and students, were feeding themselves and the family with the income from tutoring. Due to the CCP regulators the investors lost billions. Their wealth and effort, all of it was for nought, gone overnight, wiped out in no time.

Don’t Bother

Budding entrepreneurs, knowing what happened to the tutoring and tech industries, were put off. Why bother, your confidence, sacrifice and energies would be wasted in such an environment. Everything you invested could be gone overnight. This is just one of the key factors fueling the dissatisfaction among the youth.

Wind Up

What China has achieved since adopting open markets decades ago is to be highly commended. An incredible achievement that has benefited working families. The energy and wealth of the cities is clear for all the world to see. Why then deliberately put in place policies that discourage hard work and innovation.

Deep-Seek has been a stunning recent revelation. China is capable of so much more, if it were able to utilize the skills of the millions of university graduates they produce, every single year. Unemployment amongst these graduates is disappointingly high due to the scarce number of jobs available.

It is no wonder that slangs ‘let it rot’ and ‘lay flat’ are so popular amongst the youth. For many, meeting societal expectations is beyond their reach, so let it rot. An attitude that is an existential threat to China.