Involution: China’s Despairing Buzzword

Learning Chinese involves more than just memorizing vocabulary, grammar, and cultural norms. To keep pace with the evolving Chinese language, it’s also important to stay up-to-date with the latest internet buzzwords, such as “involution.”

In 2020, involution or neijuan emerged as a particularly popular buzzword in China. The New Yorker featured involution in an article, discussing this Chinese loanword.

Neijuan’s Origins

Involution (內卷 nèi juǎn) was initially an academic term referring to the phenomenon where once a cultural pattern reaches a particular state, it cannot stabilize nor change into a new form; it can only continue to become more internally complex. Think of the Kafkaesque society described in The Trial. If you haven’t read Kafka, you still might be familiar with his satirization of the increasingly absurd complexity of bureaucracy.

Many Chinese college students initially used the term “involution” to refer to irrational internal competition or “voluntold” (被自願 bèi zìyuàn) competition, particularly popular amongst Chinese youth. Through “involution,” young people can see how they suffer a common fate with others as Chinese society becomes increasingly complex without innovation. Many feel helpless and dissatisfied with the current situation of being involuted.

Biking While Studying

A video surfaced online showing a student from Tsinghua University in Beijing, riding his bike at night while working on a laptop that was placed on the handlebars. This incident sparked discussions on social media, with many criticizing the intense academic pressure that exists in an involuted society.

What exactly does “involution” mean on the internet? Put bluntly, it means too many people are fighting over limited resources. Some people use “involution” for competition in education. For example, The enrollment quotas and the number of exam candidates are also fixed. Some schools have started offering extra classes. Other schools worry that their exam scores will lag and follow in providing extra classes.  As a result, everyone’s exam scores improve, but the admission threshold also rises accordingly.

Some people use “involution” in workplace competition; for example, in Chinese office culture, people often don’t leave work on time to show that they’re hardworking in front of their superiors. Other employees feel pressured to follow their example. In the end, everyone deliberately works overtime. 

As mentioned, in English, Neijuan has become a loanword from Chinese. The reason why is the concept of Neijuan is unique to Chinese academic competition, and though Kafka expressed a similar sentiment of society becoming internally complex, neijuan has a unique meaning.

 Are you done reading? Check out Oolong Goal to learn more about Chinese buzzwords.