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. 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 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.
What People Are Saying
"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." Alex Press, labor reporter writing in Jacobin Magazine, the New York Times, and the Nation
"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." Yi-ling Liu, author of The Wall Dancers: Searching for Freedom and Connection on the Chinese Internet
"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." Eric Blanc, author of We Are the Union
"Hear the voices of China’s new working class in the making. College-educated, precarious, earning hardly enough to raise families, Involution's workers are at the same time thoughtful, articulate, and sharply aware of multiple social contradictions. It is great to have this important set of documents translated into English." Biao Xiang, author of Self as Method: Thinking Through China and the World
"Involution offers simple yet profound narratives of Chinese youth’s work and life in the current era, reflecting both the material and spiritual crises of Gen Z in China and beyond. While not producing the stories as a political text, highlighting a worker inquiry also calls for co-experience, co-identification, and co-research with the working class, blurring the boundaries between blue-collar and white-collar and transgressing the defining limits of job and joblessness to nurture solidarity." Pun Ngai, author of Dying for an iPhone: Apple, Foxconn, and The Lives of China's Workers
