Involution in China: the appropriation of a political critique by a neoliberal workplace
Cover image credits: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-57328508
By Jingye Tang
“What we have here is pattern plus continued development. The pattern precludes the use of another unit or units, but it is not inimical to play within the unit or units. The inevitable result is progressive complication, a variety within uniformity, virtuosity within monotony. This is involution.”
-- Alexander Goldenweiser (1936) in Geertz (1963:81).
“Neijuan (“内卷”) is the scenario in which vicious competition emerges among dagongren (“office jockeys”, a Chinese internet buzzword from 2020), resulting in the gradual worsening of their working conditions and subsequently broadening the scope of exploitation that the capitalist class can impose on them.”
-- Adam, an accountant from my fieldwork which was conducted in an accountant agency in Shenzhen during July, 2021.
The theme of this article is 'involution': a concept with the ability to unite Goldenweiser and Adam’s ideas despite their distance in time and space – and despite the fact that they had never heard of one another. What the American anthropologist was describing is an aesthetic pattern that he found in the “primitive” art of the Māori: an art style which was trapped inside a fractal cycle of repetition and reproduction of the same motifs over and over again. In this cycle, progress in creativity and the difference in aesthetics was only marked by the chronic increment in the number of motifs in a given area (Goldenweiser, 1936 in Geertz, 1963:81).
A Ceplok patte, a type of Javanese batik pattern which can also be described as an involuted art form
A paradigm like this, filled with contradictions and obstacles stemming from the internal lacking of creative energy was then summarized as “involution”. Upon research in Indonesia, Clifford Geertz (1963) adopted “involution” from Goldenweiser as a concept in his analysis of the Javanese agrarian economy. Under the double pressure from colonialism's embargo of productive equipment and the agrarian economy’s saturation of labor supply, the result was an economy of internal complexification and, at the same time, no growth in productivity. Phillip Huang (2002:6) first re-interpreted Geertz’s theory and translated “involution” into Chinese, terming it neijuan (a portmanteau joining two Chinese characters, “internal” and “spinning”). Although Huang’s re-interpretation of Geertz has been contested (Liu and Qiu, 2004; Pomeranz, 2003), neijuan as the Chinese translation of involution has mushroomed in Chinese popular discourse since Huang’s work – and it has assumed a life of its own as a term that captures the zeitgeist of contemporary China.
My interlocutor Adam, meanwhile, did not refer to Goldenweiser, Geertz or Huang in his understanding of neijuan. In fact, Adam had not heard of any of these writers; he also did not elaborate on what he meant by neijuan, taking it as a self-evident term. For Adam, neijuan conveys a chain of regress which generates suffering. The word was used by him to refer to a phenomenon that he found in his labor as an accountant, namely the gradual demise of working conditions including worsening wage rates and increasingly longer working hours– and it is a common feeling shared by all eight members in the office where I did my fieldwork, and many more outside of it. In 2020, neijuan was ranked as one of the ten most popular internet buzzwords in China and managed to outlive all its competitors on the list with unassailable popularity even now.
Moreover, as exemplified by the definition that Adam attributed to neijuan, the virality of the term has coincided with an apparent de-academization of the concept and an ostensible unmooring of its history within qualitative social science. Of course, scholarly articles that trace the origin of neijuan in China and explore its meanings predate this boom, but with the adoption of neijuan in Chinese colloquial language, references to it no longer rely solely (if at all) on academic exegesis for their meaning; instead, the term is used to describe one’s own everyday experiences and observations. Indeed, I have come to understand how this term provided an avenue for a young urban population to articulate their worsening working condition in a bold and straightforward manner.
Manager 1:
“I don’t want our team to be in the exact same situation as the beginning of the year. All of you were in the “American time zone” at the start of this year – no exaggerating. You worked till four in the morning and came to the office at one in the afternoon. Is this a healthy working schedule? Is this a sign of high efficiency? Our clients were having difficulties communicating with you. In our new round of work in the mid-year, everyone, please, leave at 9:30 p.m. at the latest.”
Manager 2:
“Indeed, our company requires you to engage in result-based work, not time-based work. We feel as if you like overworking for long hours in a war of attrition. Efficiency and teamworking needs to be improved immediately”.
In the afternoon of my forth day at the company, I observed what seemed like a pep talk at a departmental meeting in which attendance by all team members was demanded. The managers wanted to address the supposed issues with the team’s working efficiency and the absence of a (good) fenwei (“atmosphere”) among the team. The appearance of these two senior managers in the same room was a rare event; the managers’ speech was an explicit denunciation of the working pattern of their team: a daily work-time rhythm that inverted the usual nine-to-five in a stark way that conveyed the sense of living in another time zone. This degree of overworking signaled to the managers unhealthy competition among team members to the extent that it resembled “a war of attrition”.
The use of the word neijuan is represented by the blue line, other words came from the list of 10 most popular internet buzzwords in China in the last years. Source: https://index.baidu.com/v2/index.html#/
Everyone in the room sat silently. None took objection or expressed shock. One manager then began calling everyone to take turns to introduce themselves and to articulate their expectations for the future working intensity. At this point, a worker next to me suddenly spoke of their experience at the start of the year. With a serious and mildly emotive tone, they refuted the claim that they “liked overworking” and emphasized this point with two knocks on the table. They lowered their head, it seemed that they were secretly wiping their tears. On the first day of my fieldwork and right next to me, there was already a silent protest against the grievance from work. It left me shocked and speechless.
It was then my turn. I announced my ethnography project on neijuan in front of colleagues and especially in front of the project management team in order to negotiate informed consent to conduct my research. As soon as my brief introduction concluded, I was greeted by an immediate response from one of the managers: “Neijuan? Oh, dear fellow student, you are in the wrong place for investigation! Unfortunately, we do not have neijuan in this office!” The project manager burst into laughter spontaneously. Yet as he gazed around the room expectantly, the manager only found some awkward grins from colleagues, squeezed out of the corners of their mouths. At this moment, I observed a discernible divide about the office members’ interpretation of neijuan.
It is evident that project managers and my colleagues alike were tied up in a regressive process of involution. The focal point of Geertz’s involution theory is precisely how low efficiency and productivity stagnation of the Javanese economy combines with the political economy’s inhibiting effects (such as Dutch colonizers’ containment of any productive capital to be introduced) to resolve the problem. On the workers’ side, One colleague said to me that accounting work was basically “complexification of the smallest number” and that even the smallest numerical discrepancies had to be assessed and accounted for. Thus, in trying to satisfy the requirements of producing accurate figures in reports with a poressing workload and ever-changing requirements from the management and clients, forced them to variously make sense of involution. However, Management too was facing an evident double crisis that brought involution as a forefront issue: the demands from clients were difficult to fulfill at current levels of productivity, eked out by long hours of work. At the same time, the lack of new recruits and experienced employees has been a troubling issue. In fact, in August 2021, when both of the managers were present in the office, their main topic of conversation was the number and names of those who resigned.
Being an ideal employee in my fieldsite – as elsewhere in contemporary China – is fraught with various involuted ethical paradoxes. I observed three key virtues that management considered indispensable for such an ideal worker to embody: “gaoxiaolv” (“high efficiency”), “gaomingandu” (“high receptivity” to suggestions), and “zhengnengliang” (“positive energy” ). Yet from the perspective of my colleagues, this ideal type is hard to embody and is fraught with paradoxes. For employees, overworking has been routinized and normalized – and yet also variously ridiculed. In the words of the managers, overworking was unmoored from a personal ethic of self-sacrifice and had instead become an indicator of low efficiency. This had a direct impact to the workers’ bargaining power with the management team, as one member observed:
"Before quitting, L always stood up to the manager and told her to stop demanding that she stay in the office [after already long working hours, probably after 11:00 p.m.]. L even dared turning their phone off during annual leave. But even then, the manager still wanted L to stay around because L is good with the numbers."
However, in everyday workplace interactions , “neijuan” or “juan” (shorthand for “neijuan”) was not frequently mentioned and in fact tended to serve to describe trivial matters, almost always in a teasing tone. For instance, during lunch time, when a colleague seemed reluctant to leave due to being preoccupied with their workload, another colleague would typically walk in front and say, “biejuanle” (“stop juan”). In another instance, when a different colleague was choosing which kind of food they would order for dinner and subsequently chose “qingshi” (“light food”, a type of food that was suggested to be healthy in ingredients and served lightly), another colleague would hover over and jibe, “you are juan on food now [too]?”.
This limited usage can be linked to the fact that the workers have identified real and personal obstacles in their career. The below-average salaries (compared to other high-tech companies who operated in the same area) and the managers’ behaviour combined to generate shame and indignation for workers. In response to the ideal worker figure that evidenced the three virtues, the accountants often self-effacingly employed a four-point inversion of it to describe themselves: “dixiaolv” (“low effieicny”), “dimingandu” (“low receptiveness”), “funengliang” (“negative energy”), and the newly added “zhizaomaodun” (“seditiousness”) in response to the newest solution raised by the management team to deal with the current crisis – teamwork.
Writers and social commentators have noted that neijuan emerged on the internet since April 2020 and has increased in virality ever since (Wang and Ge, 2020). This is highlighted by the prior graph which depicts its increased popularity, and through the qualitative responses of my interlocutors. In a group interview during my fieldwork, the accountants in the office spoke about when they first saw neijuan on the internet. The responses ranged from May to September 2020 and for some, a few months later than that. One accountant noted that they first read “neijuan” in May 2020 in an article addressing the increasingly competitive dating “market” in which the pursuit of love had been increasingly based on valuations of the candidates’ wealth and university degree.
Another accountant noted that their discovery of neijuan dovetailed with a personal panic that they had about the sudden “grade inflation” of the university degree/ranking of the new interns and colleagues around soon after returning to work in September 2020. However, despite the seeming novelty of neijuan in the public gaze, the use of neijuan in public discourse in China has historical roots. Attention to involution as a helpful way to describe a negative paradigm of living or working has emerged in China over the last decade . For instance, an online article published by the Daily News of Guangdong in 2014, aptly headed “Involuted Life”, introduces involution in the following manner:
There is a shepherd on the hill who tends his sheep every day and a pedestrian who came by stepped forward. Q: What are you doing? A: Shepherding. Q: Why are you shepherding? A: To earn money. Q: Why are you earning money? A: To find me a wife. Q: Why are you having a wife? A: To have children? Q: Why are you having children? A: So that they can help me with shepherding. This dialogue may appear amusing, but most people do live in such cycles: what drives us to work or study hard may actually be our desire to maintain our current way of life. This life is an “involuted” life.”
The 996 working schedule has come to the fore in the last years, with the increasing neoliberalisation of labour in China
The moral of the story is simple: step out of your comfort zone and you might live a better life. However, its mention of involution in the take-home message complicates the plausibility of it, because the author seems to overlook the essence of Geertz’s notion of agricultural involution: the wider context in which the so-called “internal complexification” or the de facto stagnation of productivity occurs. On the contrary, the story’s author’s proposed solution to involution seems to pivot solely on the agency of the individuals; the simplicity of pastoral life and the desires of the shepherd described in this article appear to convey a primitiveness in the mindset of individuals who live an “involuted life”. The incongruence between this story and scholarly conceptualizations might originate from the fact that the author later inaccurately describes “involuted effect” as a theory from the discipline of psychology, limiting the relevance of . Geertz’s discoveries in Java to a case of “repetitive cycling without progress” as the author puts it.
It is hard to speculate what the influence of this allegorical story is on the emergence of neijuan as a popular Chinese vernacular. Nonetheless, similar didactic short stories that emerged before the virality of neijuan share many features with the above tale: unbreakable repetitions and loss in productivity from a “managerial” perspective. That is to say that such stories attribute agency for the solution to neijuan to the individual and largely de-contextualise human subjects from their structural, political economic setting, seemingly misapplying Geertz’s insights. I call such works with these features as exemplifying the “shepherd paradigm” to involution/neijuan – these mark the starting point of the non-academic usage of neujian, which endures in the commonsense meaning of the term today.
With the popularization of neijuan in 2020, increasing scholarly attention went into tracing the origin of neijuan. The resultant analyses consisted of a more accurate alignment to the term as expounded by Geertz and Huang than the shepherd paradigm. For instance, on Baidubaike, the largest encyclopedia website in China, a total of ten references are dedicated to the entry of neijuan. However, this modern usage cannot be considered as a radical break from the previous paradigm. In this refashioned meaning neijuan seemed to detect the responsibility of involuted life in people themselves, dismissing the structural motifs that lead people to experience neijuan. When I tried to recover the original meaning of the word with my colleaugues, I always reached a dead end. On one occasion, after bringing up Geertz’s four-point definition of involution to a colleague (of which the last point refers to “the self-sophistication of the economic system”), she turned to me and asked if “involution” was perhaps actually a good thing. Awkwardly, I had to remind her that it was a term that denotes social critique. On other instances, when I began raising the subject of “zhidu” (“the system”) in front of my colleagues I always found them unresponsive. This has been an ethical issue which concerned me in my fieldwork. The incorporation of the political economy is, however, a critical feature for conceptualizing involution in a systematic way. Without paying attention to the political and economic forces which generate the “involuted life”, there is a risk that the concept of involution becomes redundant.
In an online post published in a Chinese video game forum in 2010 which was titled “involuted: the shortcomings of the social structure of World of Warcraft (WOW) and their consequences”, the author analyzed what he believed to be wrong in his beloved video game community. In his analysis, he challenged the then claim “is this just a game?” and suggested that the political and economic implications of World of Warcraft must be taken seriously. Describing it as an aggregate of social relationships between players and exploring the premise of a world structured by involuted stagnation, the World of Warcraft community according to his analysis was indeed subject to a sweeping kind of transformative change just like an actual society. In the conclusion, he observes: 'How different can the transformations in the video game WOW be to the social problems that plague the people of our country? To understand our games is also to understand our reality'. In hindsight, to my colleagues/interlocutors and me, his analysis appears prescient. Yet for my interlocutors, their jobs do not afford them the privilege of simply ‘turning off’ and leaving the game, let alone a reflective space to question their workplace as a ‘game’ in isolation from the requirements real life. In the reality of being forced to deal with involution in the workplace, they come to see themselves as subjects becoming lesser versions of themselves, being twisted and folded by the swirl that seems to pull everyone inside. Thus this refashioned, vernacular use of neijuan becomes the way Chinese workers try to express their material feeling of entrapment without talking about what is the unmentionable cause of it, “zhidu” (“the system”).