Neijuan (China)

Neijuan 🇨🇳
Location: China and East Asia
Definition: Growth without development caused by intense competition
Keywords: China – East Asia – Competition – Employment – Education – Productivity – Public opinion
Clusters: Survival – Market
Author: Haoxuan Mao
Affiliation: Alumnus, School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London, UK

By Haoxuan Mao, Alumnus, School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London, UK

Neijuan (内卷) is a Chinese expression explaining internal depletion and growth without development due to intense competition (nei stems for ‘inner’ and Juan for ‘circle’). Group anxiety generated by neijuan is particularly evident among younger generations as a result of increasing economic competition.

Seen as the origin of contemporary neijuan, agricultural involution was first proposed to describe the long-term stagnation of living standards due to a massive employment in Java’s agriculture not followed by an increase of output (Geertz 1963). The understanding of the term then evolved to explain people’s tendency of wasting time and resources on meaningless things, leading to underdeveloped growth and internal depletion (Huang 1990). In the fierce competitive context of the contemporary Chinese economy, the use of neijuan has extended to all sectors of society (Ji 2010).

Neijuan is evident in many workplaces where employees, fearing that their superiors will consider leaving work on time a symptom of the fact that they do not work enough, will wait to leave until everyone else has left the office, even if they have completed their tasks. At times whole offices remain at work overnight.

Point systems used by technology companies are another driver of neijuan. For example, Alibaba’s performance ranking system was identified by the Financial Times (2021) as the problem behind the brutal working conditions of employees of the Chinese giant. Also, in Chinese tech companies such as Tik Tok, it is common the 996 system, that consists in starting the working day at 9 a.m. and finishing it at 9 p.m. over 6 days, defined by some as “slavery in the modern workplace” (Wang 2020). Employees exposed to unhealthy corporate cultures rooted on productivity at the expense of their wellbeing easily fall into neijuan.

Pressure caused by competition puts also small business owners under stress. Neijuan pushes them to lower their prices to keep up with competition, resulting in a subsequent decrease of the quality of goods. This idea was explained by Sun, a young start-up owner in the catering industry, who argued that to compete with giants in the industry and takeaway platforms, he had to keep the prices of products as low as possible and hold frequent promotions. Faced with huge losses, he eventually went out of business (BBC 2021a).

Top-down formal policies, such as the process to obtain a registered residence (户口, hukou), can indirectly contribute to neijuan. Having a local registered residence (hukou) is a prerequisite for buying a house in the big cities of China, and the scale of salaries affect the capability to obtain the hukou. Although hukou does not have a market price, candidates who receive a wage higher than the social security payment and meet other informal conditions are more likely to acquire a Shanghai hukou. Data from RSJSH (2021) illustrates that from 2013 onwards, the annual social security payment base in Shanghai gradually increased from 8% to almost 14%. As such, with a fixed number of hukou to assign, if everyone starts to raise the base and personal tax, the average necessary to have a chance in the competition will rise as well.

Considering that diligence is the word most often taught by Chinese parents to their young children (Wang et al. 2012), family face (mianzi) is a bottom-up drive for neijuan. Career success and a decent social status are the main sources for mianzi and parents encourage their children to work hard to gain a competitive edge over their peers and to establish a strong family reputation, wang zi cheng long (literally “hope that children achieve success”). This pressure already starts in pre-school, where children aged 3-6 years are encouraged to engage in extra-curricular tutorial training (Li 2021).

Scarce educational opportunities and employment pressures can lead to an excessive focus on academic achievement (Luo et al. 2013). A senior student at the Renmin University of China (Xinhua Net 2020) disclosed that when a word requirement for an essay is around 3,000 words, many students choose to write over 10,000 words to achieve a higher grade. Unlike in the West, Chinese teachers tend to acquiesce this behaviour, resulting in almost everyone’s assignments going well over the requirement, even if the percentage of students who can get a full grade is fixed. This intensified competition deters young people from understanding when the effort is enough, even if they are forced to stop.

In China, where young people’s parents have moved from poverty to affluence, and where millennials have risen rapidly through the opportunities of the internet, Generation Z is faced with high house prices and limited opportunities (China Daily 2018). As such, neijuan translates into the frustration of middle-class young people facing a missed window of opportunity. Although having grown up witnessing their elders’ rapid development with the dividends of China’s rapid economic growth, the reality is not what they expected (Telpov and Chen 2021).

On the other hand, a person who does not strive for success or actively withdraws from intensified competition diminishes the pressure that comes with neijuan only to fall into tangping (躺平), “pursuing a life without desire” (Bai 2019). This value is hardly accepted by authorities and mainstream media that refer to tangping as a “shameful behaviour” (Xinhua Net, 2021). While tangping and moyu (摸鱼, “slacking off at work”) are self-defensive mechanisms, for young people remains difficult to escape the social pressure of neijuan.

Despite the one-child policy, China’s population grew by 400 million from 1980 to 2020 (World Bank, 2021b), clashing with the current trend of slowing economic development in East Asia (World Bank, 2021a). The economic slowdown will make employment difficult, increasing the quest for higher academic qualifications (Sun, 2008).

Expressions similar to neijuan can be found in Korea (네이줜, nea i jueon) and Japan (ふじょうりなないぶきょうそう, fujyourinanaibukyousou, meaning unanimous internal competition), known as “inner circle” (BBC Korean 2021) and “unanimous internal competition” (Nicovideo News 2020), respectively. Given that Confucianism is the foundation of the East Asian cultural context, diligence (qin) and courtesy (li) are considered significant reasons for the birth of neijuan in East Asian countries (CGTN, 2020b).

References

Bai M. 2019. ‘Jiwa for all, no escape from the “high screening” game’. Contemporary workers, 11

BBC. 2021a. ‘Young Chinese people struggling between “Neijuan” and “Tangping”’. 2 June, https://www.bbc.com/zhongwen/simp/chinese-news-57304453

BBC. 2021b. ‘The buzzwords reflecting the frustration of China’s young generation’. 14 June, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-57328508

BBC Korean. 2021. ‘내권: '열심히 일해도 성공 못한다' 중국 청년들의 번아웃’. 15 June, https://www.bbc.com/korean/international-57451262

China Daily. 2018.. ‘The young people who are struggling today, how many opportunities are there for them in the future?’ 8 August, http://china.chinadaily.com.cn/2018-08/08/content_36730490.htm

China Global Television Network (CGTN). 2020a. ‘Behind '996' schedule: Work to a better life, not ICU’. 16 April, https://news.cgtn.com/news/3d3d774d336b544f33457a6333566d54/index.html

China Global Television Network. 2020b. ‘‘Involution’: The anxieties of our time summed up in one word’. 4 December, https://reurl.cc/yrkGY2

Financial Times. 2021. ‘‘Obedience and fear’: the brutal working conditions behind China’s tech boom’. 9 June, https://www.ft.com/content/37e9e0c6-952e-4fcf-9318-786ebd5e3a3d

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Insider. 2021. ‘More and more Chinese 20-somethings are refusing to compete and "lie flat" after seeing their friends work until they die’. 8 June, https://www.insider.com/disenchanted-chinese-youth-join-a-mass-movement-to-lie-flat-2021-6

Ji, Y. 2010. ‘A review of theoretical research on involution’. Journal of Changchun University of Technology: Social Science Edition, (3): 48-49

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Luo, R., Tamis-LeMonda, C. S., and Song, L. 2013. ‘Chinese parents’ goals and practices in early childhood’. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 28 (4): 843-857

Nicovideo News. 2020. 中国から見た韓国社会「内部に不条理な競争と消耗がある」＝中国メディア. 29 December, https://news.nicovideo.jp/watch/nw8718877

Shanghai Municipal Human Resources and Social Security Bureau (RSJSH). 2021. ‘Shanghai Social Security Base Statistics for the past years’, https://rsj.sh.gov.cn/tshbxjfjs_17348/index.html

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Wang, J. J. 2020. ‘How managers use culture and controls to impose a ‘996’work regime in China that constitutes modern slavery’. Accounting & Finance, 60 (4): 4331-4359

Wang, X. L., Bernas, R., and Eberhard, P. 2012. ‘When a lie is not a lie: understanding Chinese working‐class mothers' moral Teaching and moral Conduct’. Social Development, 21(1): 68-87

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Xinhua Net. University students’ ‘neijuan’: competition or internal conflict? 9 November, http://www.xinhuanet.com/2020-11/09/c_1126713666.htm

Xinhua Net. 2021. Where is the sense of justice when it is shameful to “Tangping”? 20 May, http://www.xinhuanet.com/comments/2021-05/20/c_1127467232.htm