They call themselves the “rat people.”
The phrase has become the latest viral trend among China’s unemployed millennials and Gen Zs, who now proudly say they’re spending entire days in bed, surfing the internet, and eating takeout.
It’s an extreme version of the “lying flat” counterculture movement young employees popularized as they rebelled against China’s grueling 72-hour workweeks and the “996” tech culture that saw employees working from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. six days a week.
“I refuse to be ashamed of being a dependent, I’m defending the name of the rat people,” one young woman says in a montage of what she calls her 83rd day lounging in her bedroom. She shared the video montage on RedNote, a Chinese photo-based app popular among women.
“After three years of hard work, I finally got my parents to realize that holding a job wasn’t building wealth for myself,” she adds.
China’s burned-out counterculture
Lying flat has seen different iterations over the years. The movement included young adults saying they’ve given up by “letting it rot.” Others resigned themselves to living as “full-time children” who mooch off their parents.
After the pandemic, lying flat became so prominent on social media that it sparked alarm in Beijing as the central government tried to reinvigorate its devastated economy.
But being one of the “rat people” is more than lying flat or giving up.
“Lying flat was: ‘I might not be doing anything, not working a 9-to-5, but still doing things that I like,'” Ophenia Liang, the director of Digital Crew, a marketing agency that focuses on Asia, told Business Insider.
“The rat people want to be the exact opposite of the rest of the self-disciplined and glamorous internet that goes to the gym,” she said.
Many “rat people” posts are, in a sense, the antithesis of the influencer routines one might find on Instagram or TikTok, or, if you’re in China, Weibo and RedNote.
Vital to the trend is the embrace of this low-energy lifestyle. “Rat people” are meant to be content as shut-ins.
American Instagram stars like Ashton Hall tout waking up at 4 a.m. for a run. Young “rat people” on RedNote, by contrast, relish in posting “daily schedule” videos of lying in bed at 4 p.m. and doom-scrolling on iPads.
A change in generational fortunes
Attitude is one motivator driving the “rat people” trend; affordability is another.
Millennials and Gen Zs are the first generations in China who can afford to stay jobless and still survive, Liang said.
“Many of their parents were born in the ’60s and ’70s and benefited from China’s economic growth, so they have some savings,” Liang said.
“This is the first economic slowdown these younger people have had in China,” she added. “They’re not as resilient as people who were born in the ’60s or ’70s. So some of them come up with this sentiment of: ‘Why try so hard?'”
Liang warned that many popular posts of “rat people” schedules on Weibo and RedNote are likely exaggerated by clout-chasers trying to go viral. But their success implies a broader sentiment in the country.
“It fulfills some people’s thinking, because you might look at other people your age being very disciplined, and you feel guilty,” she said. “Having these ‘rat people’ as the other extreme, you feel less guilty.”
A byproduct of China’s slowing economy
China’s battered economy and competitive professional environment has left many of its youth feeling despondent.
The average Chinese youth today has to contend with a tougher and more demanding job market than their parents did.
Last month, China’s urban jobless rate for those between ages 16 and 24 stood at 16.5%. The country briefly stopped reporting its youth unemployment rate after it hit a record high of 21.3% in the second quarter of 2023.
China’s National Bureau of Statistics started publishing the statistics again in January 2024 after it amended its methodology to exclude students.
But the troubles don’t necessarily end even for those who secure a job. China’s gruelling “996” tech culture fueled an expectation for people to observe a punishing work schedule.
That sense of disenchantment led to the rise of the lying flat movement in 2021, which promoted rejecting constant competition in favor for a more relaxed, minimalist lifestyle.
Eric Fu, a senior research fellow at the University of Melbourne’s Youth Research Collective, told BI the rise of self-mocking social media trends like being a “rat person” or “lying flat” isn’t necessarily a bad thing — it’s an evolution of how the country’s people see work.
“It shows people are starting to really give some consideration about the work they really want to do, and the meaning of their life. It also shows that Chinese society has become more diversified in a sense,” Fu said.
Fu said it’s easy to misunderstand where these Chinese youths are coming from when they extol the virtues of the “rat person.”
“This group of people is still, to a certain degree, a privileged group. They have the luxury to do this, but it doesn’t mean they just want to waste their life,” he said. “They’re probably just taking some time off.”
“It will be really naive to assume these people just simply want to live like that forever,” he added.
