Moyu

The expression derives from the Chinese proverb "muddy waters make it easy to catch fish" (浑水摸鱼), which originally described taking advantage of chaos. In its contemporary usage, moyu has shed the opportunistic connotation and settled into something more mundane. It describes looking busy at your desk while scrolling your phone, attending meetings with your camera on and your attention elsewhere, or stretching a thirty-minute task across an entire afternoon.

Moyu gained currency in Chinese internet culture alongside neijuan (involution) and tangping (lying flat), forming a vocabulary of workplace resistance that emerged in the late 2010s and early 2020s. Where tangping rejects the system outright and neijuan names the exhausting competition within it, moyu describes the daily compromise of someone who has neither quit nor fully participated. It is a survival strategy dressed in the appearance of compliance.

The practice is not uniquely Chinese. American workers use phrases like "quiet quitting" and "phoning it in" to describe similar behavior. German employees speak of Dienst nach Vorschrift, working strictly to rule. The Japanese term madogiwa zoku, or "window-seat tribe," describes employees sidelined to meaningless positions. What distinguishes moyu is the aquatic metaphor, the image of a worker slipping a hand beneath the surface to grab something for themselves while the water remains undisturbed above.