The ‘lying flat’ movement standing in the way of China’s innovation drive

This is just my feels, not well informed, but I feel like a huge huge part of China's so-called ascent has taken the form of astronomically rising real estate property values, adding "wealth" to the nation.

To me, this is the curse of development. It's where everything has gone to shit in every other nation: a bigger & bigger divide as property values march upwards, more and more people becoming unable to afford a reasonably quality standard of living. Having to work much harder to gain entrance to having made it alright.

Questioning a seemingly ever more competitive, ever more inaccessible system seems only natural.

I'm interested to know if "lying flat" is really a big dampener on the growth of enterprise. Personally I still feel strongly that real economic growth is mostly "diamond in the rough" eventually coming to light, struggling for years to get good at making value, and the world slowly realizing just how amazing the company is. Whether or not these kinds of enterprises are being formed & started, or other scales of initiatives are being taken- it hardly seems like a country so big & filled with so many people as China is going to be deeply impacted in what purposes it chases by some opt outs. Yes, it reduces the demand somewhat, these people will not be big consumers, but China especially historically has been export focused anyhow.

This reminds me of the "Turn on, tune in, drop out" Hippy movement.

There are no numbers. Not even compelling anecdotes. Except that an internet forum has 200,000 members, which is about 1/6 of 1/10 of 1% of the population. Brookings is trying to curry favor, no more and no less.