Sixth Tone’s sister publication The Paper sat down to discuss involution with anthropologist Xiang Biao, a professor at the University of Oxford and the director of the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Germany. But involution’s academic roots and its widespread application suggest the word, to many, captures something more fundamental. In a sense, it’s the latest word for the negative side of China’s cutthroat society, similar to sang, the mentality of people who have turned apathetic by incessant competition, or the various memes people use to decry their intensely boring white-collar jobs. The Chinese word, neijuan, is made up of the characters for ‘inside’ and ‘rolling,’ and is more intuitively understood as something that spirals in on itself, a process that traps participants who know they won’t benefit from it. Involution can be understood as the opposite of evolution. Originally used by anthropologists to describe self-perpetuating processes that keep agrarian societies from progressing, involution has become a shorthand used by Chinese urbanites to describe the ills of their modern lives: Parents feel intense pressure to provide their children with the very best children must keep up in the educational rat race office workers have to clock in a grinding number of hours. Over the past few months, Chinese people from all walks of life, be they software developers, stay-at-home moms, or elite university students, have all discovered their daily lives can be accurately described by the same once-arcane academic term: involution.
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