“内卷”是什么意思？

English (for the teacher)

In September 2020, a photo began spreading online: a Tsinghua University student riding a bike, with an open laptop propped on the front, using the computer as he rode. Lots of people found it both funny and impressive, and started calling students like him “Kings of Involution”.

From then on, the word “involution” was everywhere. At the end of that year, it was even picked as one of the “Top Ten Buzzwords of 2020”.

So what does “involution” actually mean? The easiest example is a cinema. Everyone starts out sitting down to watch the film. Then someone at the front stands up and gets a better view. The people behind can't see, so they have to stand up too. Soon the whole cinema is watching on its feet. And the result? Nobody sees any better than before, but everyone is more tired.

That's “involution”: everyone puts in more and more, but gets no more back. Say the teacher asks for a five-thousand-character paper and someone writes ten thousand; next time everyone writes ten thousand, but the number of people with the top marks stays the same.

In fact, the word started out as an academic term, translated from the English “involution”. In the 1960s, the American scholar Geertz studied farming on the island of Java in Indonesia. He found that as the population grew, farmers did more and more work in the same rice fields, yet farming never really developed. He called this situation “involution”.

Later, the word moved from student life into every line of work. At a company, if everyone else works overtime until nine, you feel awkward leaving at six. If one parent signs their child up for three cram classes, the other parents sign theirs up for five. The internet came up with lots of new expressions, too: someone who tries way too hard is a “King of Involution”, someone who doesn't want to compete any more says “I'm not rolling any more”, and when a friend is pushing too hard, you tell them “Stop rolling”.

Interestingly, in the last few years the word has even made it into economic news. To sell more, some companies cut prices lower and lower, until in the end nobody makes any money. The government has started talking about “anti-involution” too, hoping to reduce this unhealthy kind of competition.

So next time you see someone on the subway eating breakfast, reading work emails and memorising vocabulary all at once, you can say quietly: “That's way too much rolling.”