"Let it Rot" - China's Youth are Giving Up on Life

by Lan or let it rot is a new movement that's sweeping through China at the moment bylan is when young people refuse to put in further efforts into life because they just can't see any hope in doing so let's cut to the chase here everybody you may have heard of Tung ping or lying flat in fact I did a video about that and now you may have heard of this new catchphrase coming out of China called Let It rot well I'm here to explain to you what this means and also to dispel a few myths this isn't some big thing that's suddenly hitting China all of a sudden and engulfing the youth and the masses no this is something that's been going on in China forever but first a quick word from today's sponsor hey I get it we're living in a high-tech world and people need their high-tech gadgets I mean have you heard about these Optical discs that use lasers pretty futuristic I know but let's just say you want to write a CD and you hop onto Amazon and you go search for a CD writer I mean look at the 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cultivate partner donates to a charity that you select 24 hours after your purchase follow the link in the description to download and install cultivate 100 free and now back to the show I first have to tell you about one very big difference between Chinese society and Western society and that has to do with ambition you see ambition is usually what drives successful people you want to have a better car than your neighbor a bigger house you want to become successful and famous it's called ambition it's called drive and it's what drives entrepreneurs and business people and people in life in general to really get out there work hard earn more money make a name for themselves growing up in mainland China is less about ambition and more about obligation you're obligated to go out and work in order to support your family in order to support your parents in order to support your grandparents in order to get a house in order to get married in order to continue on the family structure it's a very very different set of circumstances you see hard work is not rewarded in China in fact the less you work the better it is and the more you are respected and let me give you an example somebody who graduates from college now in China with a master's degree in other words you have studied and put in the effort and worked incredibly hard to go through high school which is very challenging in China and then through college and you've earned your master's degree you've earned all your degrees the kind of job that you're going to get is going to pay a pittance you will go into a job that earns you less than a thousand US dollars a month less sometimes if you're lucky a little more and your boss the person who's rich the guy who owns the company the guy who's running around with the fancy Bentley cars and all the Jets sitting around the place will probably be a tobacco Uncle who can barely read and write somebody who did not put in the work somebody who got there through family connections through CCP party connections through guanxi and so the motivation to be a hard-working over-achieving person isn't really there when you see that 20 year old driving around in a Ferrari in Canada or Australia or the us wherever from China the student he didn't work to get there he didn't earn his Ferrari that was given to him by his parents who own a factory or have CCP party connections and this is no different in mainland China the people running around with fancy cars throwing money everywhere and showing off their wealth are not people who have earned that money it's people who have fallen into that money whether it be through like I said family connections or Communist Party connections and that kind of thing so this whole movement of lying flat and let it rot is very squarely a middle class problem in China and look middle class can mean quite poor in other countries you know we're talking about people that are earning a couple of hundred dollars a month all the way up to people who are earning a couple of thousand dollars a month this is called middle class in other words not very poor but not rich you see if you're poor in China you have no choice you're moving from your hometown to the cities to urban areas and you're working in factories you're working very hard you're doing all kinds of menial jobs whatever it takes whether you're making truck tires or working on an assembly line or sweeping the streets or whatever you're doing you do so because you have no choice you need to work in order to eat and in order to send a little bit of money back to your aging parents and your family back home in your hometown who need money to survive low class poor people in China have no luxury to lie flat or let anything rot rich people in China like I said couldn't give a damn their monies come easy for the majority of them very few Rich Millionaires and billionaires in China actually did any hard work to get themselves there it's always circumstantial it's always because of nepotism or because of their party connections being in the right place at the right time happening to be on the right piece of land at the right time it's not through hard work and ambition that they got there of course you will get the exception to the rule but I'm speaking in generalities here and go and take a look look at the uh very rich Millionaires and billionaires around China and find out what their Roots were you can always trace it back to some or other Communist Party connection or some kind of family connection that's just how it works in China so it's the middle class we're talking about the single children who grew up in a stable home with enough wealth to get by with enough prospects with a good education people out there who know that uh if they were to just kind of drop their work for a while they'd be able to coast along on some savings or coast along on their parents or whatever the case may be these are the people that have the luxury to lie flat or let it rot and I cannot blame them as mentioned before people that put in the work the effort that have the drive to actually work hard are never rewarded in China in fact they're taken advantage of if you put in a lot of work in your office your boss will simply assign you more work to do you'll be working overtime unpaid overtime by the way as is seen many times in China you've heard of the whole 996 9 A.M to 9 pm 6 days a week in China this is real not a hell of a lot of Works being done a lot of the time but you know what you're still in the office and you're stuck there doing work and the more work you do like I said The more work you'll be given so people have reached a point now where they realize there is no point in putting in the extra work because you're not rewarded for it in China if you're not poor and you're not struggling to put food on the plate why bother because you know what cost of living in China is actually really cheap of course it's more expensive in the big cities and it's become more and more and more expensive over the past few decades but you can still get by by paying very little to satisfy your base urges such as hunger and thirst and a roof over your head rent is cheap food is cheap that sort of thing so if you've got a little bit of money in the bank or you have parents who have a job or something along those lines you can't afford to lie flat and let it rot for a while a couple of months half a year a year of course you're gonna have to do the odd job here and there in order to earn a little bit of spending money but you get what I'm saying here this whole idea of lie flat and let it rot is less of a movement that's happening now and more of an attitude that the middle class in China has adopted over the past couple of years and especially with the way China is going punishing billionaires what happened to Jack ma what happened to all these billionaires that suddenly get detained who get disappeared who end up being charged who end up fleeing to other countries it's certainly not an enticing Prospect to become a billionaire in China because it looks like as soon as you do you get a Target on your back and in nowhere in the world does the old adage the nail that sticks up gets hammered down ring more true than in mainland China after speaking to a number of my friends in China I came to the current consensus that the ambition that the majority of them have is not to land some kind of a high-paying job or to be a jet Setter or to become a millionaire or a billionaire no their ambition is to land a government job because if you work for the government everything is taken care of you get good benefits they give you a year's supply of oil rice and toilet paper as an annual bonus on top of other things and life is comfortable you're taken care of you'll have a good pension and you won't really need to worry and you can kind of curse through life and I find that to be well kind of demotivating to be honest I met some very bright very promising people during my time in China especially when I was working at tencent I've met some very smart people I've met some wonderful outgoing amazing people and it's just horrible to see the system around them beat them down and take all of that enthusiasm and drive and take it away and drain it out of them because of no reward for them putting in the extra effort China's economy has been slowing down for a long time now jobs are far more difficult to get there is fierce competition especially for those coveted government positions but I've got a secret for you lying flat let it rot it's not new it's something that's been in China for the longest time and something that I came across when I first got to China traveling in the rural areas I would often speak to people and they have a saying and the saying is which means pass the day and this is an attitude that you find in the rural areas of China where people do as little as possible just to pass the day next day wash rinse and repeat it is exactly the same as lying flat and let it rot just under a different name so I just wanted to shine a bit of light on this dispel any Illusions you may have that this lying flat let it rot movement is a massive new thing in China it's just part of Chinese Society specifically in the middle class and the more the Chinese government closes off China the more the Chinese government punishes those who stand out those who really strive to be something different and special the bigger this problem is going to get and soon China will just be lying flat I hope you've learned something from this video and are a little bit more equipped the next time somebody talks to you about this whole lying flat or lettered rot movement that's happening in China it's nothing new until next time unlike the Chinese government stay awesome hey hey before you guys go anywhere I just want to say thank you to everybody who watches my videos I don't know if you know but everything all the footage you've seen in this video including the background and everything is something I personally shot myself when I was living in China so you won't see this anywhere else I've also started adding a little bonus clip at the end of each one of my videos so stick around right till the end there'll always be something there I'll leave it there raw uncut with the original audio and everything in it and again thank you to each and every one of you who share my videos watch my videos and of course a massive massive shout out to those of you who are generous enough to support me on patreon you guys are awesome foreign

Channel: serpentza

Views: 1,080,740

Keywords: Let it Rot, Bai lan, bailan, tangping, tang ping, lying flat, China, youth, Serpentza, Winston Sterzel, advchina, adv china

Id: IfgFNRnXCMc

Length: 13min 59sec (839 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 22 2022