Lying flat is a symptom, as is for profit tutoring and the Chinese government banning it. The root cause is the culture [1] [2] and socioeconomic conditions [3] [4].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/996_working_hour_system

[2] https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/RAMJ-03-...

[3] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-05-17/china-s-h...

[4] https://www.reuters.com/world/china/cost-having-child-china-...

The description of “students joining Lying Flat Movement” sounds very like symptoms of burnout so I think it is fully related.

Sure, among 10s of millions of students, you can find such instances. News reporting are always focus on outliers, exceptional, and plain attention grabbing cases.

I just talked to my friends back in China, they don't say anything about students being part of the movement.

What I’m saying is I don’t think it’s a “movement” as in some conspired extremist movement. If it was a movement the Chinese population is also suffering a “Mass Sleep Movement” every 8PM to 6AM.

Burnout from stressful non-physical office works is a well established concept, though not yet widely agreed to also happen on kids.

Basically if you keep a person in an office to attend meetings and conferences for 12 hours a day for 5-10 years, some functions of the brain ends its life and the person won’t be able to take on certain tasks. That’s what it is IMO.