On April 4th, 2026, a 26-year-old product manager in Beijing, China, uploaded a file to GitHub. Within 48 hours, it had been downloaded by millions of Chinese tech workers. Her video about this file pulled over 5 million likes in China alone. This file and the video along with it has caused billions of dollars in damages to the Chinese economy.
And the worst part is is that Chinese workers are happy about this. The CCP has still not banned this too. And they haven’t even named the person who posted it. That’s because Xi Jinping knows that he literally cannot do that because banning something like this would mean to admit something that they desperately don’t want the world to know.
This is a story about how a generation of Chinese 20year-olds are winning a war against Xi Jinping. And they’re winning so convincingly that Xi Jinping himself had to come out and beg them to stop. Take a listen. To understand why this is happening, we have to go back to 2021. In April of that year, a guy in China who called himself the kind-hearted traveler posted a 200word essay to a Chinese forum.
The title of this post was lying flat is justice. His argument in this post was pretty simple. He was tired of life. So, he wasn’t going to buy a house. He wasn’t going to get married. And he wasn’t going to have any kids. In short, he didn’t want to work towards a better future for himself. He was just basically going to lie flat and the CCP could do nothing about it.
Now, people complaining on social media is nothing new. I’m sure you guys have seen it millions of times already. This post should have died a quiet death. Like millions of posts that complain about life on social media. Instead though, it got reposted millions of times. That’s because it described exactly how every young Chinese person was feeling.
You see, for the previous 30 years, the deal in China had been very simple. You work 996, 9:00 in the morning to 9 at night, 6 days a week. You eat the bitterness, as Xi Jinping likes to say, and in return, you’d be richer than your parents. For many Chinese citizens, this was a great deal, and it worked for 30 years.
Unfortunately though, it does not work anymore. In 2023, the youth unemployment rate in China hit more than 21%. It was such a high number that CCP announced that they will not be publishing this number anymore. Then they came back a year later with a new formula. A formula that conveniently did not count any students that had graduated school.
And guess what? The formula worked. The Chinese unemployment number magically dropped. This reminds me of a joke that my parents once told me. A town just kept on flooding every year. So the mayor installs one of those measuring poles by the river. You know, with a red line at the top that says danger flooding.
Now, next time the storm hit, water rises right up to that red line and citizens start to panic. They march to the city hall and demand that the mayor do something. So he does. He goes down through the river and moves the red line up, saying, “Look, it’s not flooding anymore.” That’s basically what the CCP did.
Instead of solving the problem, they just redefine the number that points out that there is a problem. Now, China’s youth unemployment number are not that much of an outlier. Take a look at this chart that basically compares youth unemployment in many different countries. Here you can see the 21% Chinese youth unemployment that CCP had announced itself before they stopped publishing the number.
And then when they came back with the new formula, the Chinese youth unemployment dropped to roughly 16%. And guess what? Countries like the UK, Italy, Chile, Finland all pretty much have the same youth unemployment number. So maybe you’re wondering this is not such a big deal. Well, this is where China’s size actually becomes a massive problem in more ways than one.
First, it already has millions of people who are unemployed. But on top of that, it has 12 million more graduates who are walking into the worst job market in 30 years. Then guess what? Next year it has an even bigger cohort of graduates who are expected to come into this market. Now of course majority of these graduates will hopefully find a job but around 15th of them are expected to be unemployed and that’s bad.
On top of that the situation gets worse if you look at the jobs some of these people are actually taking on. More than 20% of delivery drivers in China, aka people who deliver Door Dash and Uber Eats in China, hold a college degree. And then at least 70,000 drivers have a master’s degree.
Now, I’ll give you guys that 70,000 is not a huge number in a country like China. But still, these graduates, especially the ones who have master’s degree, probably did not imagine themselves delivering food for other people. Now, much like in the rest of the world, in China, an entire generation was told that studying hard at the GAO led to a stable urban career.
That social contract is breaking. This is where I want to remind you guys of the golden rule of YouTube, especially when you’re making China related videos. You just have to talk about the one child policy. You just have to. You see, each unemployed or undermployed graduate is the only child of two parents.
and maybe even up to four grandparents. They have invested everything in their kids’ education. And for these families, the situation is not looking bright. Their kids are having a harder and harder time finding a job. And at the same time, Xi Jinping is killing off some of the biggest industries in the country.
This is where things get a bit complicated because just recently, Xiinping killed off the Chinese tutoring industry. This industry was worth around $120 billion per year. This was clearly a big business inside of China. Now, Xi Jinping believed that education, especially low-level education, should be free.
Parents should not have to fork out bunch of money just for their kids to go through grade school and elementary school. Not a bad idea, but unfortunately, killing an industry this big does mean that people, a lot of people are going to be out of jobs. And on top of that, there are no new jobs being created. In fact, this crash was so bad that Xi Jinping is now actually going back on his word and loosening restrictions on the tutoring industry.
So, he created all this mess for no reason. And the people who suffer the most were, of course, the tutoring business people and the young people who, you know, depend on the jobs that this industry provides after they graduate. So, hopefully now it’s starting to make a little sense as to why Chinese students are starting to lie flat. Then in 2022, things got worse.
Lying flat evolved into something darker. It was bilon or in English let it rot where lying flat was saying that hey I will not play your game. Bonan basically means that I will not play your game and I kind of hope that you lose too. Now 2022 was the year of the great Chinese lockdown, the COVID lockdown where Xi Jinping wanted to achieve his impossible goal of zero CO.
That’s why he locked down 25 million people in Shanghai inside of their apartments for 2 months. There were drones flying above the buildings telling residents to control their soul’s desire for freedom. People were literally starving in highrises while CCP officials were giving press conferences talking about how food supplies were abundant.
And then something snapped. In November of 2022, a fire in a building in Yurumo killed 10 people who were literally locked inside their apartment. meaning they could not leave even if they wanted to. The doors were chained shut from the outside so people inside could not break containment and this created a massive backlash that Xi Jinping did not expect.
Thousands, maybe even tens of thousands of Chinese citizens poured into the streets in Shanghai, in Beijing, in Changdu, in Wuhan, anywhere you can think of. These people were so sick of the lockdown that they were literally chanting publicly down with Xi Jinping, down with the CCP. Something like this has not happened in China since 1989.
Theaman Square massacre.
The CCP was in full panic mode. In some cities, people were not allowed to make any signs that they could take to the protest. So people started holding up just a blank sheet of white paper and then people got arrested for holding up a blank sheet because government believed this was them speaking out against their policies.
But guess what? Despite all the crackdown, this actually worked. Within weeks, Xi Jinping did something he had never done before. He abandoned his entire zero COVID policy. In one press conference, the whole of China changed overnight. The protesters had learned something that the CCP didn’t want them learning. The regime could flinch if the backlash was strong enough.
This meant that lying flat and Bonan just kept on going and they became worse. By 2023, Bilan had taken a new shape. Adults with master degrees from major universities like Shingua or pecking university, basically China’s Harvard and MIT started moving back in with their parents. They called themselves full-time children. They treated this like a job, but to me it sounds like retirement.
All they would do is eat dinner with their parents, drive them to doctor’s appointment, take care of grandparents, and anything else that they have to do to support the parents, but in return, they expect a salary around $4,000 to $8,000 yon a month. That’s around $500 to $1,100 per month. It’s important to clarify here that these are 27 year olds with elite degrees in China who did the math as to how they want to live their life.
They looked at the Chinese job market and they looked at their parents’ retirement saving and they decided that they were better off living as full-time children. Now, this is not some isolated incident. By 2023, an estimated 16 million young Chinese people were calling themselves full-time children.
This was a major social phenomenon. And then by 2025, it got worse. Bonan had taken its final form. Rat people. The hashtag rat people on Chinese social media crossed more than 10 million views. Related hashtags like proud rat person or bad all days started trending regularly on Chinese social media before CCP sensors deleted them.
Then these hashtags would just instantly get reposted under a new variation of the same name. Let me give you a day in the life of someone who calls themselves a rat people. These are mostly Gen Z teenagers who don’t have a job. So, their daily routine consists of staying in bed for 3 hours after waking up, washing up a bit after that, then sleeping for another 5 hours, not eating anything until their parents wake them up in the evening, and then this whole cycle continues.
They eat dinner, go back to sleep, then wake up the next morning, stay in bed for even longer, and then just stay in bed until they have to wake up again for dinner. Basically, like rats. Avoid light, rhythm, and societal expectations. All this is having a real impact on the economy. And I’m not just talking about rat people.
I’m talking about the whole thing. Let it rot, buy land, and then rat people. This is hurting the economy, which in turn is making situation worse for new students who want to come into the workforce, which means some of these students are joining this cohort of people who have basically given up trying.
In fact, in late 2024, a Chinese economist named Gao Shen Wen said the quiet part out loud. During a speech at an investor conference in Shang Jang, he dropped three major bombshells. First one being that the Chinese GDP growth has been overestimated by roughly 3 percentage points each year. This has major consequences. He was basically saying that China’s economic miracle for the last 3 years was largely a statistical fiction.
It was a lie and roughly 40 50 million people who should have had jobs don’t have jobs. CCP is lying about employment in the country. The second bombshell he dropped was talking about the generational divide. He said that post pandemic, China has been made up of vibrant old people and lifeless young people who are desperate to get to a better situation.
This was the most important part of his speech because this quote that he talked about resonated with the younger population of China and it quickly went viral all over Chinese social media. The catchphrase that hit the hottest was him saying that the Chinese young Chinese people were turning off the lights and eating noodles.
This is a Chinese investment slang which is basically used to describe someone who’s down on their luck after losing a lot of money in stock market. He was saying an entire generation is basically like someone who just had bad luck in the stock market. This was a major moment in China because this guy wasn’t some dissident. He wasn’t someone who hated the CCP.
He wasn’t someone who was, you know, living overseas and just on China. He was the chief economist at one of China’s major stateowned brokerages. So when someone with his kind of access and his kind of loyalty to the government says something, you know, he’s not just doing this to on the government or on the party.
He’s speaking the truth. But unfortunately, CCP did not see it that way because within 48 hours of this speech going viral, he was basically erased from Chinese internet. His speech, the full speech was deleted. His personal WeChat account and other social media accounts were deleted. And the CCP basically sent a message to every other economist saying that hey this is one topic you cannot talk about.
He was just stating what he believed to be the truth. But unfortunately that was a bit too much for the CCP. This all brings us back to April 4th 2026. The GitHub upload that we talked about at the start of the video. That tool was put out by this girl Koki Zu. She is 26 years old.
She’s an AI product manager living in Beijing. And to understand what she put out, you need to understand what has been happening to Chinese tech workers for the last few months. You see, Chinese tech companies had started doing something genuinely dystopian, even by CCP standards. They were forcing their engineers, their workers to log every aspect of their workflow.
How they think, how they decide, whatever they’re doing, they want some AI tool to log everything. So the company could distill this information into an AI agent. Then they could fire all their employees or at the very least reduce the headcount at the company, aka less job for Chinese workers.
For the workers, this was a scary situation. Imagine you’re at your job and your boss wants you to work. Of course, you want to do a good job, but in the back of your mind, you know there’s an AI tracking everything you do, so one day it can replace you. This is exactly why the GitHub tool went viral. It was a tool that was meant to fight against the AI that was looking to replace the workers.
Let me explain how this tool works. It has three modes: light, medium, and heavy sabotage. Depending on how closely your boss is watching you, the AI that’s tracking your every move gets fed material and data that is so deliberately corrupted, so basically wrong that the resulting AI agent that is made using this data is useless.
And if you play your cards right, your boss will not be able to tell anything that you did wrong because the locks that this agent or this tool is creating, they look very real. In fact, Koki Chu told MIT Technology Review and I quote,
“I originally wanted to write an OPED opinion piece, but decided it would be more useful to make something that pushes back against this problem.”
And that’s the energy that an entire generation of Chinese people are feeling. Now, remember what I told you at the beginning? The CCP has not banned this tool yet. Because banning something like this would mean publicly acknowledging that Chinese tech workers are being asked to train their own replacements, and that is something Beijing absolutely does not want to do.
Now, this AI tool is just one pillar of the revolt that Chinese workers are carrying out. The second pillar is something called run philosophy. Now, the word run here is a pun in Chinese. In Mandarin, the character run sounds basically identical profitable. So when young Chinese people say they are running, they are saying it’s profitable to leave the country.
That’s the whole pun. What run philosophy actually looks like in practice is a giant crowdsource manual for how to get out of China before things get worse. Go to any Chinese social media platform and you’ll find threads where young Chinese trade incredibly detailed guides as to how to leave the country. They talk about Canadian Express Entry or maybe Japanese highskilled professional visa program.
Even Singapore’s tech pass, they basically talk about which country they can go to and how easy is it to get in there, what paperworks you would need, what you have to say to the immigration officer at the airport, what you have to say during your visa interview. They also share tips on how to actually move money out of the country.
You see, in China, it has become drastically harder to move your money out since the new safe rules have kicked in. Those rules require Chinese banks to flag any crossber transfers of over 5,000 yuan. That’s around $1,000. And banks are also required to keep transaction records on file for 10 years.
With all these rules, CCP is basically financially speaking shutting down its borders. Not to keep people out, but to keep people in. And that’s exactly why the young Chinese people are running faster than ever. Canada, Japan, and Singapore are still the top destination for Chinese talent. But lately, Mexico, and Hungary have started showing up in threats, too.
And you guys want to hear what Beijing’s response is to all this? Well, it’s pretty similar to what Cuba did under Fidel Castro. Beijing has labeled run philosophy unpatriotic, which is the exact same word every collapsing regime in history has used to describe its immigrants.
