内卷nèi juǎn

Involution (the rat race)

bié juǎn le!别卷了！Stop competing!

内卷, “involution”, is competition that wears everyone out and gets nobody ahead: everyone works longer, and the reward stays the same. It went from a sociology term to a meme in 2020.

Took off: 2020
Started in: A sociology term
Today: Now everyday Chinese

What it means

The usual example is a cinema. One person stands up to see better, so the person behind stands up too, and soon everyone is standing, tired, with the same view as before.

The short form 卷 is a verb: 别卷了 means “stop overdoing it”, and a 卷王, “king of 卷”, is the person who always does more. It is half complaint and half joke.

How people use it

内卷 is now ordinary Chinese, used about school, work, shops and whole industries. Its opposite, the decision to step out of the race, is 躺平.

亮亮

你们组又加班到十点？
nǐ men zǔ yòu jiā bān dào shí diǎn?
Your team worked till ten again?
一个人不走，大家都不敢走
yí gè rén bù zǒu, dà jiā dōu bù gǎn zǒu
If one person stays, nobody dares to leave.
你们公司也太内卷了
nǐ men gōng sī yě tài nèi juǎn le
Your company is such a rat race.
卷不动了，我想躺平
juǎn bu dòng le, wǒ xiǎng tǎng píng
I can’t keep up anymore. I want to lie flat.

More examples

公司里大家都在加班，真是太内卷了。
gōng sī lǐ dà jiā dōu zài jiā bān, zhēn shì tài nèi juǎn le.
Everyone at work is doing overtime. It’s a total rat race.
我不想再卷了，下班就回家。
wǒ bù xiǎng zài juǎn le, xià bān jiù huí jiā.
I don’t want to compete anymore. I’m going home after work.

For the word itself and how to reply to it, see 内卷 in the slang dictionary.

Where it came from

Involution is an academic word. The anthropologist Clifford Geertz used it for farming that took in more and more work without producing more, and the historian Philip Huang applied it to rural China. Chinese students began using it around 2018.

It became a meme in autumn 2020, after a photo of a Tsinghua University student went viral: he rode a bicycle while holding an open laptop, still working. People called him a 卷王. That December, 咬文嚼字 put 内卷 on its list of the ten most popular phrases of 2020.

The original. A photo from the Tsinghua campus: a student cycles down a road with an open laptop in front of him. Guanhai News retold the story in December 2020. Guanhai News (in Chinese)