Videos with the hashtag quiet quitting
have racked up more than 150 million views on social media app TikTok.
The phrase gained momentum after a TikTok video was posted on the subject
by a software engineer in New York. I recently learnt about this term called
Quiet quitting, Where you’re not outright quitting your job but you’re quitting
the idea of going above and beyond.
But this isn’t just an American phenomenon.
The rejection of hustle culture has been happening all around the world, including
China, where the movement started long before it was popularized in the West.
I talk with my friends, and they often use that term like Tang Ping, I really want to lie
down and lie flat and I don't want to do my job and don't want to achieve something. It’s more
like people’s attitudes towards their life. This is Dian Gu. He works as a content
specialist for an internet company in China. Bai Lan is more like the definition
of quiet quitting. People don't want to commit more to their jobs and they just
do what the company require. So these kind of phrases are really commonly used by me, by
my friends, by the younger people in China. Since 2021, the internet in China has been awash
with the phrases Tang Ping, which means ‘lying flat,’ and more recently Bai Lan, which means ‘let
it rot’. This has coincided with many young people in China becoming increasingly frustrated with
both their personal and professional lives. Unlike most countries, China has continued to
pursue a zero-Covid strategy, which requires strict and sudden lockdowns and extensive
testing for cities experiencing outbreaks, confining hundreds of millions
of Chinese people to their homes. As a result, the country’s economy has slowed
down and is struggling to boost growth. The World Bank forecasts China
will grow just 2.8% in 2022, while the rest of the Asia-Pacific region
is expected to grow 5.3% on average. This is the first time China’s GDP growth has
lagged behind its neighbors since 1990. Amidst the economic uncertainty, youth
unemployment in cities rose to almost 20% in July 2022 – the highest since the Chinese
government started publishing the figures in 2018. As a result, the labor
market has shrunk since 2019. At the same time, the number of people
entering higher education has grown rapidly over the past two decades, which
means there is fierce competition between graduates for white collar jobs.
This has increased pressure on young people to outperform their peers
and has resulted in burnout. You know naturally, people are
going to rebel against something that really undermines their physical,
moral and spiritual well-being. Dr Maria Kordowicz, is an associate
professor in organizational behaviour at the University of Nottingham.
I'd argue this isn't a new trend. It is new terminology and it has really
captured the imagination of the media, of the workplace. So this isn't the first time
that we have seen almost a mass ideology take shape around our relationship with work.
So, the lying flat movement, for instance, in China, we could see as a real
reflection of that counterculture, and particularly young people in this case,
is my understanding, saying, “Well, enough is enough. This is not the sort of workplace that we
want to enter into, and things need to change.” Burnout is also at an all-time high in the
U.S. According to a report released by the American Psychological Association.
44% of American workers reported physical fatigue – a 38% increase since 2019.
It’s also seen as a contributing factor for The Great Resignation, an economic phenomena which
saw a record number of resignations with young workers toward the end of the Covid-19 pandemic.
The world’s other major economies have also seen growing discussion around the drawbacks and even
dangers of long, unrelenting hours. Japan has a famously hard-working culture - a problem the
country has grappled with for decades. Karoshi - a Japanese term meaning death by overwork -
is, according to the Japanese government, responsible for 200 deaths a year, but
activists say the figure is closer to 10,000. As campaigners raised awareness of Karoshi, the
late Prime Minister Shinzo Abe presented the “Work Style Reform” bill in 2018, which meant
employees were obligated to take holidays, a response to the 50 percent take-up of paid leave.
A Karoshi hotline was even created to support people who were suffering from excessive stress.
Its effectiveness, however, is debateable, with critics saying company violations are difficult
to track and even more difficult to penalize. Still, while Japan may be going someway to
address the impacts of its hard-working culture, Chinese president Xi Jinping, called for the
country’s youth to find ‘great ideals’ and for their goals to be a part of the ‘bigger
picture’ of the Chinese nation and people. The quiet-quitting trend has been a far
less disruptive force in Europe, where working cultures are different.
A 2022 report by Gallup on the state of the global workplace shows that employees in Europe
are the least engaged, when compared to the rest of the world’s regions. But the region still ranks
highly when it comes to life evaluation, with 47% of respondents saying they were ‘thriving’.
In the same report, East Asia, which includes China and Japan, had the highest
regional percentage of daily stress. Do you think that these various different
movements are all coming from the same place? It's a post pandemic hangover, and people
are reassessing their work life balance? Or are they unique to the countries
that they are happening in? There absolutely is a difference in working
cultures. I think to use the word hangover is perhaps a little bit glib in that, you
know, this pandemic. I mean, it was an unprecedented global event. Sociological,
the psychological impact on individuals, on groups, on organizations on societies has
been huge, and I think that's something that we've universally shared across the world.
But yes, there are differences in working cultures. You know, we hear about
the 996 working model, for instance, in China. So some organizations have introduced
nine until nine working days, six days a week. You've lived in the UK and China?
Is the working culture different in the two countries? Do you think?
In the UK, people are more like work life balanced. The work hour in the UK is much shorter.
But in China, I think the work hour is much more longer and also I think it's more demanding.
People really work for 60 or 70 hours per week. China’s youth are also shouldering much bigger
expectations than previous generations. China began to open and reform its economy
in 1978, and since then has seen its Gross Domestic Product or GDP grow to become the second
largest in the world. This has led to significant improvements in citizens’ access to health and
education – and more than 800 million people have been lifted out of poverty. But those
days of rapid growth are seemingly over. Do you think there are unrealistic
expectations on young people from the older generation, your parents' generation?
For the last 40 years China's economy is like rocketing. So I think even for me or for my
parents, they're expecting their lives to get better, and also their children, they can get a
better education and get better jobs. Right now everything is becoming unpredictable. Maybe your
children, they cannot lead a life better than you. We could definitely link this wave of
quiet quitting and rethinking work, to an inherent lack of satisfaction with what
is out there in terms of job availability. Yeah, I think is quite a long way to
go. Mainly because China has still a very large population. But I think as the
population is shrinking in China right now, I think maybe in the long future, we can see that
there's companies that will change their attitudes towards their employees. For the work culture to
shift I think maybe really take a long time.
