Neijuan

94 pointsposted 6 hours ago
by vermilingua
(en.wikipedia.org)

31 Comments

torginus

3 hours ago

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.

yorwba

an hour ago

The people building the wheel of suffering and the ones complaining about it may both be Chinese, but they're not the same person.

nixon_why69

a few seconds ago

It's not even a person, it's a system. There's a million people behind you who will take your job if you don't grind.

tantalor

an hour ago

> Goldenweiser uses Māori decorative art as an example. The development of art was done within the framework of already existing patterns. The final pieces were elaborate and complicated in appearance but fundamentally the same as existing art.

Jeez, what an asshole.

kjshsh123

2 hours ago

>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.

yorwba

an hour ago

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."

matheusmoreira

an hour ago

What's the point of serving this average consumer if we won't end up better off though?

tancop

an hour ago

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.

mark_something

4 hours ago

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.

ZeroGravitas

2 hours ago

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.

JumpCrisscross

6 hours ago

Has it been measured? Or is this more of a qualitative critique?

lensecat

5 hours ago

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.

torginus

3 hours ago

Tbh, most people in the West would know that concept as the red queen's race from Alice in Wonderland.

JumpCrisscross

5 hours ago

Thank you for the Berry post. Has anyone tried to test his hypothesis? My gut feeling is it will check out, particularly for AI chats. Input measure is easy–you have time and text quantity. But output value is more difficult...I'm wondering if there is a good case where this could be observed.

lensecat

5 hours ago

I'm doing a PhD in sociology of work (I have a background in software development) and want to do such a study on software development with AI, but as you say it's quite hard to find a good setting, because it's hard to operationalise quality.

I have been thinking of measuring it along these lines perhaps... https://www.gitclear.com/the_ai_code_quality_maintainability...

But they have a closed sourced software so I would have to find or create an open one in that case.

Happy to hear if you have any ideas on study design!

JumpCrisscross

5 hours ago

What if you looked at scheduling? Like, an assistant or agent scheduling a calendar something?

It's atomic, and one can't usually add value beyond a low threshold. If we're seeing more words–or tokens–used over time for a task which one cannot reasonably argue has gotten more complicated in that time, it would be direct evidence of involution. If you can relate that to competition for VC dollars or customers, that takes you over to Neijuan.

nixon_why69

3 hours ago

The usage of Neijuan as I understand it isn't about a complete lack of results, Chinese test scores are really good, but there's only 10% in the top 10% so competing even harder just means everyone is miserable competing for the same number of spots. Same for production if it's driving prices down, you did produce more, but so did everyone else and the end result is a race to the bottom.

thaumasiotes

an hour ago

> In western thought, this is mostly related to the concept of involution.

> The most famous study is on Javanese farming:

I had thought that 'involution' was just a literal translation of the Chinese term, since I've never heard of the English word in this sense. To me it would just mean "turning inside out".

But things appear to be the other way around; that paper was apparently titled Agricultural involution in 1963.

It's very striking that the blog post mentions the paper, names the phenomenon "involution", and then comments that it's similar to "what Chinese social theory calls 内卷", while completely ignoring the fact that 内卷 is transparently a calque of "involution".

内 "inside", 卷 "roll".

nixon_why69

4 hours ago

In China, one could look at hours of homework, work hours etc and conclude there's a reason the term was coined.

hirako2000

5 hours ago

It isn't pointing at particular system to blame.

But if you feel like it's raining, it probably is.

netmare

5 hours ago

There's a Greek proverb disputing the latter: they are spitting on him and he thinks it's raining.

klibertp

4 hours ago

Interestingly, an almost identical proverb exists in Polish ("him" is replaced with "swine" canonically, but it's often replaced by a person's name). It's used to suggest that someone is either too dumb or too self-assured to accept criticism. Is the intended meaning similar in Greek?

JumpCrisscross

5 hours ago

> It isn't pointing at particular system to blame

It's hypothesising a phenomenon. I'm looking for a measure. The phenomenon is intuitively correct, but also suspiciously attractive. Sort of like the bullshit-job (or corrupt-bureaucrat) hypotheses, where every job or public official one doesn't like can be conveniently terms bullshit absent any rigour.

0wis

2 hours ago

Definitely a concept that should be diffused and discussed in France, especially in preparation of next elections for which anti-capitalist sentiment is quite high.

anovikov

5 hours ago

"1920s style crisis of overproduction with Chinese characteristics"