One Generation Is Lying Flat, The Other Is Still Standing at Attention for the Boss

🇨🇳 China · 🇩🇪 Germany

By Priya Mehta, The Global Office

In China, the generational rift shows up as a slogan: tang ping, "lying flat," a quiet refusal by younger workers to compete for the 9-9-6 grind — nine to nine, six days a week — that built their parents' careers. In Germany, the rift shows up as a formality problem: a 2022 survey by the German Chamber of Industry and Commerce found 63% of employers saying young people lack the motivation and pressure-tolerance of prior generations, even as harder Institute for Employment Research (IAB) data shows Gen Z's German employment rate has climbed six points since 2015 to 76%. Two very different generational arguments, both boiling down to the same accusation from above: the kids don't want to work like we did. The data suggests, in both places, that's not quite true.

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Do's & Don'ts

🇨🇳 China

🇩🇪 Germany

China: The Youngest Workers Found a Word for Quitting Without Quitting

Tang ping entered Chinese public discourse in 2021 as a term for opting out — not leaving the workforce, but declining to compete for the grueling 996 schedule (9am–9pm, six days) that had defined success in China's tech and finance sectors. A 2023 Peking University survey found more than 62% of millennials and Gen Z workers in urban China reporting they feel overwhelmed by work-life imbalance, and China's Supreme Court and labor ministry formally declared 996 illegal in August 2021 following public outcry over worker deaths. Yet the practice persists in pockets, particularly in tech, and enforcement has been uneven — some firms, including Midea and DJI, have publicly rolled back extreme-hours culture, while others have not.

What makes this a genuinely generational split rather than a simple labor dispute is the framing: younger workers describe rejecting not just the hours but the entire bargain their parents made — marriage and homeownership on a fixed schedule, career status as the measure of a life well lived. State media initially condemned the trend as "shameful," and censors scrubbed related terms from platforms like Douban, which tells you how seriously the government took a slogan that, on its face, just means "I would like to work fewer hours."

Germany: Formality Is Dying Slower Than the Headlines Suggest

Germany's generational story runs almost in reverse of the stereotype. Popular narratives paint Gen Z as disengaged, and a 2022 survey of German employers found 63% describing young workers as lacking motivation and pressure tolerance. But the IAB's harder labor-market data tells a different story: Gen Z employment participation rose from roughly 70% to 76% between 2015 and 2023, and — contrary to another common assumption — young German workers do not change jobs more frequently than prior generations did at the same age, per the same research.

What has genuinely shifted is formality, and it's shifting unevenly. German workplace hierarchy has traditionally been explicit and vertical — colleagues addressed by title and surname, decisions following an established chain — and that structure persists strongly in traditional Mittelstand manufacturing firms. In tech, design, and multinational offices, expat accounts describe hierarchy flattening noticeably, with the trend expected to accelerate as more German professionals who studied or worked abroad enter the workforce. The generational gap in Germany, in other words, isn't about willingness to work — it's about willingness to perform formality for its own sake.

The Reckoning

Put side by side, the two countries' younger workers are making oddly similar arguments through completely different vocabularies. Chinese Gen Z says: we will not sacrifice our health for a status ladder that no longer promises what it used to. German Gen Z says, more quietly: we will do the work, just without the title-and-surname theater layered on top of it. Both are, in effect, negotiating the terms of a bargain their employers assumed was non-negotiable.

Hofstede's power distance score for China sits at 80, among the highest in the world, versus 35 for Germany — which explains why China's generational pushback takes the dramatic form of a censored viral slogan, while Germany's takes the mundane form of a slowly eroding dress code and fewer people using "Herr Doktor" in the hallway. The higher the starting hierarchy, the louder the generational rebellion has to be just to register.

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The Part the Brochure Left Out

Quora — Someone answering "What is your opinion about the Chinese youths' lie flat movement" argued that young workers had concluded no amount of individual effort could change the broader economic status quo, making disengagement a rational response rather than laziness.

Quora — A respondent weighing whether 996 is "as bad as Western media makes it out to be" pushed back on the framing itself, noting that many Chinese workers have simply normalized the hours in a way that reads as resignation more than acceptance — a distinction easy for outsiders to miss.

Blind — Reviews of Tencent posted by current and former employees repeatedly raised work-life balance as the central generational fault line inside the company, with younger reviewers far more willing to name burnout directly than the framing used by longer-tenured staff.

queenbtravels.com — An expat writing about toxic work culture in China described the practical frustration of watching younger local colleagues quietly slow-walk assignments rather than refuse them outright — a passive resistance style that took months to correctly interpret as generational pushback rather than incompetence.

smartergerman.com — An expat account of German work culture noted the pleasant surprise of realizing that in tech and international firms, the rigid "Herr/Frau plus surname" formality was fading fast among younger colleagues, even as the same expat's more traditional manufacturing-sector friends reported no change at all.

Conclusion

If you're moving to China, understand that the generational conflict you'll observe isn't laziness versus diligence — it's a specific, documented economic protest that shows up as quiet disengagement rather than open confrontation, and reading it correctly will save you from badly misjudging your younger colleagues. If you're moving to Germany, expect formality to vary enormously by sector and company age, with the multinational tech office and the century-old Mittelstand firm operating on almost different planets generationally. The honest version, over a drink: in China, the youngest workers found a word for opting out; in Germany, they just stopped using your title. Neither one means what the boomers in the room think it means.