In April 2021, a Baidu Tieba user named Luo Huazhong (骆华忠), posting as 'Kind-Hearted Traveller,' published a manifesto titled 《躺平即是正义》 (Lying Flat Is Justice). He'd quit his factory job, lived on 200 yuan a month, ate two meals a day, and occasionally picked up work as a corpse extra at Hengdian film studios. He quoted Diogenes and declared: 'Only by lying flat can man become the measure of all things.' The post went mega-viral — a Tieba forum called 躺平 exploded from 170 members to nearly 200,000 before censors shut it down.

The government treated tangping like a threat to national productivity. State outlet Nanfang Daily ran an editorial titled 'Lying flat is shameful — where's the sense of justice?' (reposted by Xinhua). The Communist Youth League posted that 'young people have never chosen to lie flat.' Censors deleted the original essay, banned the Weibo hashtag, closed Douban discussion groups, and ordered e-commerce platforms to pull tangping-branded T-shirts, phone cases, and car stickers from Taobao. In October 2021, Xi Jinping himself wrote in the party journal Qiushi urging society to avoid both 'involution' and 'lying flat.'

Tangping is often confused with 摆烂 (bailan) but the attitude is different: tangping is quiet withdrawal — you simply stop participating. Bailan is louder, more gleeful — you're not just quitting, you're celebrating the quit. Tangping also spawned international parallels: America's 'quiet quitting' trend in 2022 was widely attributed to the same impulse. The term was named one of China's top 10 internet buzzwords of 2021.