Explainer-What is “involution”, China’s race-to-the-bottom competition trend?
By Casey Hall
Shanghai (Reuters) -China’s leaders promised to put an end to the aggressive price cuts of some Chinese companies, whom the regulators say that they have created excessive competition.
The so -called “anti -intestinal” campaign was triggered by the inheritance of the past government’s efforts to encourage the economy – and the price cuts made to promote the economy. These interruptions led to price wars in various sectors that increase concerns.
What is Involution?
China’s invasic term “Neijuan” began its trend in 2020 in 2020, and initially used by young people to describe the search for traditional success markers and the search for the self-eaten.
If some of the contexts they used are working at a reward technology company 996 hours (9:00 – 21:00, six days a week), it involved questioning what the meaning of working hard to enter a good school. If you are lucky enough to go to a job, that is, in the age of graduate unemployment.
Although the term is much less widely used in English, it comes from an invasic Latin term, which means “rolling or rotating inward”. In the 1960s, the American cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz – about the increasing complexity or effort of Javanese agriculture, was made popular to describe economic or cultural stagnation despite increasing complexity or effort.
More recently, Neijuan has become a stenography in China for exhausting, but at the same time, it is usually in vain and sometimes destructive hyper-replicab paste.
The concept is now connected to the pivot of the country’s pivot to an industrial complex, which covers one -third of global production, from property -guided growth, which has seen more investment without any increase in returns. This is a race towards the bottom.
Why is competition bad?
On social media in China, there is a frequently repeated joke with such a thing: in other countries, governments intervene to prevent anti -competitive behavior; Here they intervene to prevent competition (in China).
The issue is that the competition level reached a point where returns are not only decreasing, but also threatened economic stability.
Beijing is faced with decisions to take action against excessive capacity, excessive competition and brutal price wars, because deflationist pressures are increasing in the world’s second largest economy.
