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- Hacker News
- Has it been measured? Or is this more of a qualitative critique?
- It isn't pointing at particular system to blame.
But if you feel like it's raining, it probably is.
by hirako2000 - In China, one could look at hours of homework, work hours etc and conclude there's a reason the term was coined.by nixon_why69
- In western thought, this is mostly related to the concept of involution.
The most famous study is on Javanese farming: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_Involution
In terms of software development, here's a blogpost from 2025, by a professor at Sussex Uni: https://stunlaw.blogspot.com/2025/07/involution-and-artifici...
There are also some studies in China on the concept but I'm less familiar with that literature.
by lensecat - Involution is competition over a fixed pie. If the labor pool really shrinks, the pressure eases without anyone deciding to stop.by rye_pan
- Is there a way to only apply this to corporate profits but not the labor market? A world where production and labor demand is constantly growing but returns stay flat would be a great one.by tancop
- This came up a lot recently in regards to competition in the solar and EV spaces.
And yet, the competition generated cheap power and transport that was clean and didn't rely on foreign actors. Making life easier for many Chinese people.
It felt like the manufacturers had learned too much from western corporate media which is always moaning about competition and horrified at the thought of things getting cheaper if that would affect the sacred next quarter profits.
by ZeroGravitas - This reminds me of Santayana's quote: “Fanaticism consists of redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim.”by mcphage
- Neijuan as a word has transcended itself; it now means many different things, to many different people, in many different contexts.by mikhael28
- Semantic diffusion strikes again.
- Wow it’s a proper word for software engineering and platform complexity over the last 30 years.by api
- For docs, see also "Darwin Information Typing Architecture"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_Information_Typing_Arch...
by lopsotronic - I usually reach for Verschlimmbesserung [1] to describe that.by sunrunner
- >When capital owners are driven by competition they must work increasingly more for little or no marginal gain despite falling prices for consumers so price fixing or 'price leadership' becomes impossible.
A lot of the people in the comments here seem to miss that this explicitly isn't about workers or feeling overworked and if anything should make the average consumer better off.
by kjshsh123 - What's the point of serving this average consumer if we won't end up better off though?
- No, sociologists use the term involution to describe Asian rice farmers. These farmers poured an increasing amount of labor into their tiny patches of land to extract the last bit of productivity, yet despite their hard work, they remained poor.
The younger Chinese generation views their economic situation much in the same way: forced to overwork, with surprisingly little personal gain. They are typically not capital owners at all.
Note: the term is sometimes translated to “内旋” (“inward spiral”) in Japanese, which I believe conveys the nuance better.
by cloudbonsai - The next sentence is "On a personal level, neijuan reflects a life of being overworked, stressed, anxious and feeling trapped, a lifestyle where many face the negative effects of living a very competitive life for nothing."by yorwba
- Overworked Chinese workers have been making western consumers better off for more than two decades now. Chinese domestic consumption is very low even among developing countries, negligible compared to its gigantic export.
Upon joining WTO one prerequisite is 5 days-8 hours work week, while presently in China you often find 996 schedule instead, with factory workers even worse with 12 hour shifts and 2 days off a month.
It is simply sweatshop in the 21st century again, a hallmark of Neijuan.
by handle584 - No.
The 996 working culture in this page is actually *996.ICU*. "Work by '996', sick in ICU", an ironic saying among Chinese developers, which means that by following the "996" work schedule (9 am to 9 pm, six days a week), you are risking yourself getting into the ICU (Intensive Care Unit). [1]
Take a step further, do you want to overwork to death if you have other choices? One of the reasons behind 277k stars in 996.icu repo is that 996 working culture literally takes over every single corporations in China. With the downturn of China economy and the selective execution of Chinese labor law, in recent years, 996 becomes even harsher to labor force in China because there are more than overwork now, e.g. low salary and low human rights. When you say 'make the average consumer better off', you conveniently ignore the tears, sweets, and blood behind the facade of neijuan.
by RandyOrion - IME, when words like this become common, it allows people to identify them more easily, so it's a good thing to introduce such words.
- I'm surprised that article doesn't reference https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Queen%27s_raceby gcanyon
- ...click the Edit button?by myself248
- What I love about the Chinese is how incredibly aware and self-reflective they are about the wheel of suffering they are building for themselves.by torginus
- Don’t forget General Tso!by threecheese
- The people building the wheel of suffering and the ones complaining about it may both be Chinese, but they're not the same person.by yorwba
- For context, this article has probably been posted as it is linked to by the "Astra for Coding: Why Are We Doing This Again?" blog post [1] currently being discussed [2].by jamessb