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Involution:A Worker Inquiry Amid China's Youth Unemployment Wave
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A fascinating, intimate window onto China’s intensifying youth employment crisis
China’s hypercompetitive job market is stunting and distorting the lives of an entire generation. “Involution” is the term they have popularized for the ever-intensifying pressures of a job market where the rewards and conditions only worsen. Forced into a cutthroat doom loop, the people interviewed in Involution highlight how they are pitted against their colleagues, assigned pointless or impossible tasks, and warped by hostile environments. In response to an antisocial work culture, forms of passive resistance, such as “lying flat” and quiet quitting, have become endemic.
Through conversations with young workers from across China, the Gonglao Collective paints a haunting picture of involution’s chokehold on young lives. As Eli Friedman highlights in his foreword, the experiences described will resonate with workers across the Western world. This is essential reading for anyone looking for a way out of fruitless competition and into solidarity.
Reviews
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The workers in Involution are neither factory militants nor triumphant professionals. They are members of a generation of educated young people grappling with unemployment, overwork, and the growing sense that effort and reward have come apart. Their accounts offer a rare and compelling window into the experience of educated young people confronting precarity, downward mobility, and an increasingly uncertain future in China, issues with which American workers, too, are intimately familiar.
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When we read about China’s youth unemployment crisis or the “lying flat” meme, we rarely encounter the lives behind the headlines. By gathering the stories of young workers – from a teacher in Hunan to a debt collector in Jilin – Involution offers us an essential and deeply human glimpse into their experiences. Thanks to Friedman’s attentive translation, readers beyond China can come to understand the struggles that so many young Chinese face in their pursuit of dignified work and a decent life.
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A vital document of contemporary labor that finds, in eight Chinese lives, a story unfolding wherever a degree no longer buys the future it promised.