The Chinese slang for slacking off at work literally means touching fish.
摸鱼 (mōyú), literally "touching fish," is modern Chinese slang for slacking off at work while maintaining the appearance of productivity.1 The term derives from the classical idiom 浑水摸鱼 (húnshuǐ mōyú), meaning to catch fish in muddy water, or to exploit a chaotic situation for personal gain.2
The modern usage gained traction in gaming communities around the 2010s, where MMORPG players used it to describe freeloading in group dungeons for rewards without effort. By 2020, it had migrated from gaming slang to mainstream workplace vocabulary.3 The term went viral alongside neijuan (involution), as young Chinese workers developed a shared vocabulary for describing the pressures of the 996 work culture, working 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week.
In March 2021, a Tsinghua University student published an online course called Introduction to Touching Fish (摸鱼学导论), which became an immediate viral sensation on Chinese social media.4 On Weibo, topics related to moyu accumulated over a billion page views.
The term functions as quiet resistance against a culture of performative overwork. It sits alongside tangping (lying flat) and neijuan (involution) in a generational vocabulary coined to describe the gap between effort and reward in contemporary Chinese working life.5