Chinese basketball slang for tanking a game became a generation's word for giving up on ambition.
In Chinese basketball culture, bailan (摆烂) described teams that stopped competing in games they could not win, accepting defeat to preserve energy or secure a better draft position.1 By 2022, the term had migrated from sports forums into everyday language, adopted by millions of young Chinese workers who used it to describe a conscious withdrawal from striving.
Bailan translates roughly as "let it rot." It emerged as an escalation of tangping (躺平), or "lying flat," a movement that went viral in April 2021 after a post titled "Lying Flat Is Justice" appeared on the Baidu platform.2 Where tangping meant doing just enough to get by, bailan meant something more radical: a refusal to try at all.
On Xiaohongshu, China's equivalent of Instagram, searches for bailan returned over 2.3 million results by mid-2022. On Bilibili, a video platform, content with "let it rot" in the title ranked among the most watched.3
Professor Yu Hai at Fudan University's Department of Sociology described bailan as a coping mechanism for young people facing fierce competition and growing social pressure.4 Youth unemployment in China reached 21.3 percent in June 2023 before the government suspended publication of the statistic.
Official responses were swift. The Communist Youth League posted that "contemporary young people have never chosen to lie flat." The Nanfang Daily called the trend "shameful."5 Censors removed the original "Lying Flat Is Justice" post and disabled the search function for tangping on WeChat. The suppression only accelerated the vocabulary. After tangping and bailan, a 2025 variant emerged: laoshuren (老鼠人), or "rat people," describing those who had retreated entirely from visible social participation.6
The pattern of generational work refusal has parallels across cultures. The American "quiet quitting" trend of 2022 was widely compared to tangping. South Korea's n-po generation, those who give up on marriage, children, homeownership, and other life milestones, describes a similar withdrawal from social expectations.7