Involution — neijuan (内卷) in Mandarin, literally “inward curling” — entered everyday Chinese speech around 2020. The concept was borrowed from the American anthropologist Clifford Geertz, who described a pattern in colonial Java in the 1960s: farming systems that grew more elaborate and complex without becoming more productive, absorbing ever more labor for diminishing returns.
Chinese internet users repurposed the term to describe something they recognized in their own lives — a social dynamic in which everyone works harder and harder, competes more and more intensely, yet no one actually gets ahead, because all that effort simply raises the baseline that everyone else must now meet.
In China, where decades of rapid growth have begun to slow, where graduate degrees no longer guarantee stable employment, and the housing ladder that once promised intergenerational mobility has become unclimbable for many, neijuan gave a name to a collective feeling that had long been present but lacked a word: the sense of running faster and faster just to stay in the same place.
In the years since Covid-19, the group I call “entrepreneurial workers” — digital laborers who are neither traditional employees nor true owners of capital — is becoming a force in the Chinese labor market. Compared to the wave of mass entrepreneurship and innovation in the mid-2010s, defined by opportunity and upward mobility, the entrepreneurial workers of this decade are caught between starting a business and working for someone else.
