Why anti-involution feels anti-Chinese? ⚙️ | Following the Yuan
China's overcapacity at the macro level and insecurity at the micro level are cultural, historical, and structural.
In my most recent trip back home, I joined my grandma for lunch at her senior home. I’m told to get there before 11am, when the canteen opens.
And as if that’s not early enough, the seniors who are mostly in their 70s and 80s, and my 95-year-old grandma, would queue up to 30 mins before it starts serving.
“How long have you been doing this?” I asked as we sat down shortly after 11am this time, still full from breakfast. “It’s always been the case since I came here a few years ago,” she said matter-of-factly. “They run out of things if you get there too late.” (Like regular lunch hours, you mean.)
This canteen, like many other settings in China, needs an anti-involution movement, I thought.
Colloquially known as Beijing’s “anti-involution” efforts, the newly revised Anti-Unfair Competition Law, is set to take into effect on Oct 15. Changes in every industry started taking place this summer since the most recent revision was passed on June 27.
Before that, a vicious cycle on both the manufacturers and consumers side started churning, which was amplified by China’s flattening economic growth post Beijing’s zero Covid policy. China’s Producer Price Index (PPI), which tracks producer prices for industrial products on a monthly basis, has been negative for 35 consecutive months.
Hi-tech industries such as photovoltaics, wind power, and energy storage have fallen into the quagmire of cut-throat price competition. Before August, all Chinese photovoltaics players were in the red, despite, according to International Energy Agency in 2024, contributing 98% of the world’s solar cells. Meanwhile, real-time delivery war between platforms eats into the margin of SMEs, and customers’ perception on price are coming to a new low, which in return, forces sellers to lower standards and cost.
Could the law and auxiliary regulations — the Draft Amendment to the Price Law that were introduced in July, and SAMR’s Anti-Unfair Competition Law make it stop?
I doubt it. I doubt it because it’s anti-Chinese.
The term ‘involution,’ borrowed by Chinese sociologists from anthropologist Clifford Geertz’s 1967 book Agriculture Involution to describe how labor intensification does not correspond with an increase in productivity, first appeared in the Chinese public eye as a meme.
In late 2020, a Tsinghua student was named ‘Tsinghua involution king’ when he was trying to run an algorithm on his bike at night. (To his defense, he was not working — he just didn’t want to shut the laptop off!) The shorthand ‘卷 Juan’ as a word got popular when overworked people find themselves facing the same situations as the Indonesian farmers in Geert’s book. In 2021, many tech workers united to protest against the 9am to 9pm, six days a week work schedule in the trailblazing GitHub repository 996.ICU.
China became today’s China — as the world’s manufacturing base and 2nd largest consumer society — partially thanks to its population. And when that happens, fierce competition to an excessive level naturally comes as side effects.
A Chinese saying, which sounds like a military reference, reflects this unique mindset: 千军万马过独木桥 (directly translated as ‘thousands of troops and horses crossing a single-plank bridge’). It is used to describe scenarios in the imperial examination system, the modern-day gaokao and civil servant exam — basically, competition over economic and social resources, where very few make it to the other side. There’s another one that’s universal in gaslighting but Chinese people take it even more to heart: If you don’t do it, someone else will.
The opportunity-scarce mentality holds spillover effect even outside of China — in Chinese immigrant culture and in, again, competition for the Chinese mainland quota in fellowships and university admissions. Because there are so many of us.
It gets worse when there aren’t opportunities to begin with. When there was little food in the Great Famine, barely any opportunity the year when the college entrance exam recovered after the 10-year Cultural Revolution, people had to involute among themselves, while having to watch their backs for snitchers and corruption.
The massive population and the mentality build the foundation of involution. What it has nurtured is a collective sense of insecurity.
The majority of Chinese people were born into a buyer’s market. And involution, which increasingly just means the word competition, is a muscle memory for both the people and organizations that are built by people.
That, I argue, shapes the mentality of employees to take less than what they deserve, work more than they should, and that of business decision makers to on one hand, exploit their staff with no legal retribution, while being forced to join the price war, make short-term decisions and race to the bottom. Despite having raised nationwide awareness, anti-996 remains an aspiration. Companies like Temu and Shein run a 11116 schedule in certain departments in China. The new 611study.ICU, inspired by the anti-996 movement, sheds light on how some schools stipulate a 6am-to-11pm schedule.
Chinese people aren’t machines, but the systems are making them so with a built-in value chain — from school to college entrance exams to universities to reputable workplaces.
With the anti-involution efforts, the hi-tech industries most prioritized by the central government put their foot forward first, and said the industry prizes are moving towards a healthier direction. But fundamental problem has not been solved by the imminent pressure from government, because people and enterprises still feel insecure.
What happens in my grandma’s canteen is not the worst thing involution triggers. It’s harmless and banal. But involution is no joke for those who are born depleted of resources.
Involution isn’t just about economics and markets; it’s about intrinsic fear: Fear of missing out, of being left behind, of not having enough.
If Beijing really wants China’s “anti-involution” effort to work, it has to replace fear with security, safety net and a long-term perspective. Chinese people need a sense that everyone, eventually, will have enough to eat — even if they come a little later. 🔚
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