China’s Ministry of State Security, the country’s primary spy and political policing agency, has declared that young people’s refusal to work hard is a national security threat orchestrated by foreign forces. The accusation named no accounts, identified no funding, and cited no evidence. It did not need to. Political police do not require proof.
“Lying flat,” known in Chinese as tang ping, is a posture of deliberate disengagement: young people, exhausted by relentless pressure to work long hours, own property, marry, and reproduce, opt out. They work the minimum required, consume less, and refuse to compete. The movement spread virally on social media in the early 2020s as youth unemployment reached record highs and the economic promises of the previous generation evaporated for millions.
The Ministry of State Security’s article, published on its official channels, told Chinese youth that their exhaustion and disillusionment were manufactured abroad. Social media accounts and influencers promoting lying flat, the ministry claimed, were being amplified by foreign hands.
Hu Xijin, the former editor-in-chief of Global Times, the CCP’s flagship nationalist tabloid, reportedly found the ministry’s piece too much to stomach. From a figure professionally committed to defending the Party line, that reaction speaks to the quality of the argument.
The author of this piece read the full ministry article. No account was named. No funding trail was identified. No foreign handler was described. The Ministry of State Security, which commands some of the most extensive surveillance infrastructure on earth, produced something that reads worse than a university student’s mandated ideological self-criticism essay. Its entire argument collapsed to a single assertion: foreign forces want you to lie flat, therefore you must not.
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The ministry did not need evidence. Attaching a political label to someone requires no proof. Intimidation requires no proof. This is the foundational logic of all political police: I declare you suspicious; you must prove your innocence. The previous generation of Chinese people learned this through the Cultural Revolution, the decade of state-sponsored mass violence from 1966 to 1976, in which political accusations alone were sufficient to destroy lives. The question is whether this generation will have to learn it again.
The ministry’s article was a jurisdictional power grab dressed as commentary
Framing the ministry’s article as clumsy propaganda misses the more alarming point. Ideological guidance of Chinese youth has been the institutional territory of the Communist Youth League, the Party’s mass youth organization, for decades. Propaganda departments handle thought work. The Ministry of State Security handles spies.
When an intelligence agency steps into thought-work territory and deploys the language and logic of counterintelligence against a domestic lifestyle trend, that is a jurisdictional expansion. The ministry was announcing to every other institution in the Party-state that political security now overrides the established division of bureaucratic labor.
Every time China’s political police expanded their reach, mass terror followed
The historical pattern is worth tracing precisely.
The first episode came inside the Communist Party’s own base areas before it took national power. The political security apparatus, led by Deng Fa, the head of the State Political Security Bureau, the CCP’s early internal intelligence organization, expanded to consume almost every aspect of life in the Soviet-style administrative areas the Party controlled before 1949. Newspapers, hospitals, women’s organizations, and children’s brigades all fell under security department authority. The result was mass internal purges: Party members killing Party members, the Red Army hollowing itself out from within. Several participants were eventually purged themselves.
The second expansion came after the 1957 Anti-Rightist Campaign, directed by Deng Xiaoping, the official who later became China’s leader following Mao’s death, in his earlier role as the Party’s general secretary. That campaign relied heavily on the public security apparatus controlled by Luo Ruiqing, then minister of public security, who oversaw the political policing of civilian society. By 1959, the system had metastasized. Students from families with “bad class backgrounds,” a Soviet-derived classification scheme that sorted people by whether their parents or grandparents had been workers, peasants, or members of the pre-revolutionary propertied classes, were barred from university. Class-enemy labels proliferated. The Great Leap Forward, the agricultural and industrial policy driven by Mao Zedong that killed between 15 and 55 million people through engineered famine, produced economic catastrophe; the regime’s response was to accelerate repression, using political fear to redirect public anger away from the leadership. What followed was the Cultural Revolution, the culminating explosion of every prior campaign. Political police penetrated every household, street committee, and classroom. Ordinary police and political police fell into factional warfare. Xie Fuzhi, the minister of public security during the Cultural Revolution, died under circumstances that have never been satisfactorily explained; the official verdict was suicide.
The third expansion is happening now.
Since 2019, the Ministry of State Security has colonized universities, finance, and media
After Xi Jinping formally elevated “political security” to the top of all security hierarchies in 2019, the Ministry of State Security began moving into sectors it had never formally controlled.
The Party secretary of Peking University, one of China’s two most prestigious universities, was appointed directly from the Beijing Municipal State Security Bureau, the capital’s intelligence and political policing office. Tsinghua University, the other flagship institution, subsequently received a senior official with a security background. Ministry personnel spread across universities and research institutes, reviewing faculty for foreign contacts and scrutinizing research directions for ideological compliance. Academics learned to self-censor before applying for grants.
The China Securities Regulatory Commission, which oversees the country’s capital markets, quietly came under Ministry of State Security supervisory guidance. The financial sector, already battered by capital controls and politically motivated enforcement, began receiving direction from intelligence officers.
A career intelligence officer who has spent thirty years conducting surveillance, running informants, and detaining targets now guides the functioning of capital markets. He does not understand price-to-earnings ratios, liquidity risk, or monetary transmission mechanisms. He understands reading faces for signs of foreign allegiance and deciding who needs to be brought in for questioning. Placing people trained in that discipline inside financial institutions, universities, and media organizations substitutes political terror for professional judgment and dismantles a country’s ability to function from the inside.
One further detail has received insufficient attention. In recent years, large numbers of state enterprises, universities, and government offices have begun requiring employees to fill in their “family class origin,” a category last used systematically during the Cultural Revolution. Many younger workers do not know what it means; they assume it refers to parental occupation or income. It does not. “Family class origin” is the tool political police use to sort the population into categories of political reliability. Its reappearance is evidence that a classification-and-control system is being quietly rebuilt.
China’s censorship now works by ensuring people never learn an event occurred
Political police expansion carries a second consequence: information control shifts from crude censorship to something more effective and more total.
On March 29, something happened in Beijing. Inside China, the vast majority of people saw one video: a vehicle. Beyond that clip, hospitals in the Fengtai district had begun transferring patients, and multiple facilities were treating large numbers of cases consistent with industrial sodium nitrite poisoning, a toxic substance used in construction and food preservation that can cause mass casualties at sufficient concentrations. Almost none of this reached ordinary citizens inside China.
Telling people that a news story is false generates friction and suspicion. Blocking keywords is detectable and generates workarounds. The advanced technique is to ensure that an event never enters the information environment at all, so that the person who does not know about it has no occasion to ask questions, no reason to search, and no awareness that there is anything to find. When you cannot form the question, the censorship is already complete.
The window for resistance is closing
The administrative expansion of political police has, without exception, preceded mass political terror. The triggering event can take many forms: an economic crisis severe enough to require a scapegoat, a military confrontation that licenses emergency measures, a news story that disappears overnight. Once that trigger fires, the system collapses to two conditions: compliance or destruction. There is no middle ground, no option of sitting it out, no position called “not involved.”
The time available to Chinese people is diminishing.
Source: Beijing Spring
By Ethan Tuo
