Framing lying flat in China: Official media reports and online reader responses

Drawing on 65 Chinese official media reports and 895 reader comments, this study examines how lying flat was framed and negotiated between May 2021 and June 2022. Combining corpus-assisted frame analysis with Hall's encoding/decoding model, it analyses official media representations and reader responses. Official media discourse is heterogeneous, comprising moral-responsibility, structural-constraint, discursive-emotional, selective-exit and alternative-life and developmental-setback frames. Nevertheless, it remains normatively bounded, as all reports disapprove of sustained lying flat . Reader comments predominantly challenge official framings, and they mainly adopt four frames: structural conditions, returns and opportunity; institutional discourse, interests and responsibility; agency, participation and social obligation; and well-being, life meaning and alternative success. Different official media frames attract distinct patterns of reader responses. These findings conceptualise official media–reader relations in China as an asymmetrical process of selective uptake, negotiation and reframing rather than as mere ideological transmission or uniform resistance.