The word went viral after a student was filmed working on his laptop while riding his bike. It reflects a mix of competitiveness and desperation in the context of China’s slowing economy and the feeling that progress is impossible.
On the Chinese Internet, the current country situation — slowing economic growth, falling birth rate, scarce social safety net, growing isolation on the world stage — is often expressed through platitudes.
It was the case of tang pinga term used to describe the young generation of Chinese who want to “sit back” instead of putting effort into the economy under pressure from China, and the runxue, or “philosophy of escape” — the desire to emigrate from the country.
Recently, attacks by “revenge against society” — random incidents of violence that claimed dozens of lives — raised particular concern.
Now, there is also the neijuan, the Chinese term for “involution” — a concept from sociology that refers to a society that can no longer evolveno matter how hard I try. Applied to the individual, it means that, no matter how hard someone tries, the progress is impossible.
In China, the term has been used to describe the feeling that the ailing economy is causing a decrease in income. The Chinese characters “nei” and “juan” literally mean “roll in“.
After decades of rapid growth in the country’s economy, many Chinese millennials and Gen Z now feel that opportunities what were available to their parents no longer exist and that working hard no longer offers guaranteed rewards.
Os Chinese leaders are worriedand made it clear that they do not want the idea of neijuan becomes more popular than it already is, says .
In December, top economic policymakers met for the Central Economic Work Conference, which sets the national economic agenda. According to the closed-door meeting, the staff committed to “rectifying ‘involutionary’ competition”.
In June, at the Davos summit, Chinese Premier Li Qiang warned about the “spiral of ‘involution’” of the world economy.
The concept of neijuan applies mainly to millennials and generation Z, groups of the population that in recent years were hit hard by China’s economic difficulties.
Youth unemployment hit a record 21.3% in June 2023 — after which the government stopped publishing the data. Since then, he has returned to publishing statistics with a revised methodology. The most recent data shows that the unemployment rate for urban youth between the ages of 16 and 24 is 17.1%.
Neijuan is also increasingly used to describe certain sectors. China is investing massively in what it calls “new quality productive forces“, which means focusing more on research and production in certain high-tech sectors, such as solar energy, electric vehicles and batteries.
But the excess productionassociated with sanctions from the USA and other Western markets, led to a price war in some sectors, damaging their profitability.
Although the term has existed for decades in academic circles, it went viral on the Chinese internet in 2020 after a student at Tsinghua University, one of China’s elite schools, went cycling with his laptop open, leaning on the handlebars.
The young man was quickly crowned “the devolved king of Tsinghua” — and another meme was born, which came to represent the pressure, perhaps uselessly intense, of the work environment and the impossibility of taking a break.
The term was particularly popular in China’s hyper-competitive technology industry. Despite a workforce that is more educated than any previous generation, Many graduates have had difficulty finding employment in profitable sectors.
This situation became even more problematic when the Chinese government announced its “double reduction” policy in 2021. designed to ease the pressure on students, whobanned private classes for-profit, both online and offline, torpedoing a sector that had previously been a important employer of young people licensees.
According to one published in 2022, as a direct result of this measure, around 10 million Chinese lost their jobs.
