"Young Chinese are rebelling against society through... the tangping, or 'lying flat,' way of life... not getting married, not having children, not buying a house or a car..."

"... and refusing to work extra hours or to hold a job at all. 'I stay at home and sleep and watch television series. Sometimes I go out for walks, read books and just think a lot,' said Daisy Zhang, 28... Tangping has emerged over the last few months as the rallying call of Chinese millennials who have had enough of the rat race. Some compare them to the 1950s Beat Generation in the United States. Others call their behavior a form of nonviolent resistance or 'ideological emancipation' from consumerism. Supporters portray it as a rejection of struggle and endless striving.... Internet users identified themselves as 'lying flatists,' posting photos of cats and seals lying supine. ... When Chinese officials announced loosened family-size limits to allow all couples to have up to three children, one commentator quipped, 'We are all thinking about how best to lie down while they are pushing us to reproduce.'"

From "Young Chinese take a stand against pressures of modern life — by lying down" (WaPo). 

Here's a definition for "tangping" that somebody — LeoF — wrote up at Urban Dictionary:

A Mandarin word, "躺平", literally means "to lie down" , which is widely used on social media and among young people. The word has indifferent connotations. Tangpingers give up fighting for a better life like they used to. They are in total submission to the status quo and they willingly lower their aims, wishes and even expenditures.

They have no more unrealistic expectations, illusions, pressure or interest in real life. No more ambitions, craving for success, struggle, resistance or fear. They try to be a normal person and chillax.

All they want to do is to lie down, to "tangping" and do nothing. They aren't cooperative and they don't give a F*CK to other people's opinions or blames. Tangpingers scorn the behaviour of fleecing and milking the Masses by devious capitalists and speculators, which always try to play the young people for sucker. So no more Pie-in-the-Sky or brainwashing. Either you pay me decent money to get the job done, or I choose to "tangping" and you get nothing.

They try to find the inner peace, happiness and balance, let go of themselves from enormous burdens, pressure and baseless accusations and focus on themselves only. Tangpingism is a peaceful "demonstration" and non-cooperation movement against social inequalities, exploitation, elitism and meaningless competitions of any kind.

I must already have a tag that fits this, but which one? I know I have "laziness," "hippies," "protests," and "nothing," and "these kids today." I can see that I made a specific tag for the Japanese phenomenon, "hikikomori" — and I have 6 posts with that tag. Will there be more "tangping" posts? If I knew there would be, I'd definitely make a tag now. Ah, I'll make the tag, out of respect.

ADDED: Here's a BBC article on the subject, and it links to this at Sixth Tone, "Tired of Running in Place, Young Chinese ‘Lie Down’/The 'Why try hard when you can just skate by?' mentality embraced by some young people has not been enthusiastically received in official circles":

The new lifestyle buzzword, tang ping, stems from a now-deleted post on forum site Tieba.... The author... described how he had been unemployed for the past two years yet did not see this as problematic. Instead of accepting and pursuing society’s ideas of success, he decided to just lie down.

“Since there has never been an ideological trend exalting human subjectivity in our land, I shall create one for myself: Lying down is my wise movement. Only by lying down can humans become the measure of all things,” the user wrote in his lying-down manifesto....

There's a social media group,  the “Lying Down Group.” One member wrote:

“According to the mainstream standard, a decent lifestyle must include working hard, trying to get good results on work evaluations, striving to buy a home and a car, and making babies....However, I loaf around on the job whenever I can, refusing to work overtime, not worrying about promotions, and not participating in corporate drama.”...

A literature professor, Huang Ping, is quoted:

“The state is worried about what would happen if everyone stopped working,” said []. “Humans aren’t merely tools for making things... When you can’t catch up with society’s development — say, skyrocketing home prices — tang ping is actually the most rational choice...  In a relatively good social environment, people may feel involuted, but at least they’re trying... If it’s worse, people will tang ping.”

"Involuted," we're told, means "trapped in ceaseless cycles of competition." 

ADDED: Sixth Sense is a Chinese website. It's in English, but it uses some English words in a way that feels wrong to this native English speaker. I looked up "involuted" and couldn't find that meaning. I also had trouble with the use of "subjectivity" in "there has never been an ideological trend exalting human subjectivity in our land." I'm guessing that the word "individualism" would have been a better translation.

ALSO: Language Log has some deep detail about the Chinese use of the term "involution" (and thanks to the Linda for sending me that link):

Well, involution is an economic, more specifically, agricultural anthropological term. First proposed by Clifford Geertz regarding Indonesia's (colonial Java's) agricultural model, where many centuries of intensifying wet-rice cultivation in Indonesia had produced greater social complexity without significant technological or political change. This process — of the accumulating of societal resources without essential change at the core — was named involution by Geertz

Etymologically, involution is a “turning-in” of itself; the members within a system compete with each other increasingly fiercely with highly homogeneous methods for highly homogenous results, eating and encroaching on each other with no vision on “revolution” (to re-start). A dilemma where quantitative changes do not lead to qualitative changes, but in turn prevent the latter from coming forth by paying no attention to reflection and effective use of the already acquired sources and quantitative changes.

The concept of "involution" as a term for agrarian economic change was applied to China by Philip C. C. Huang. A good description of how the notion of economic involution developed, from the anthropologist, Alexander Goldenweiser, who used it "to describe a situation in which the crafts or art of a society stuck with the same fundamental patterns, only making them more an[d] more intricate over time", to Geertz, and thence to Philip Huang, may be found in Dietrich Vollrat, "Involution and Growth", Growth Economics Blog (10/15/18)....

In cybernetic terms, it is a chāo wěndìng 超稳定 ("super stable"), static system determined by inertia...