Neijuan | Hacker News Reader

Neijuan

en.wikipedia.org

123 pointsvermilingua49 comments

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].

[1]: https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2026/9/7/astra-why/

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49654229

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.

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

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, and that goes for your boss as well.

I wonder what happens to China when this factor disappears. China workforce peaked in 2016, and city workforce will peak in the next few years. With the economy still growing, acute labor shortage is less than 10 years away.

Don’t forget General Tso!

I'm surprised that article doesn't reference https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Queen%27s_race

...click the Edit button?

WP:NOR

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.

>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.

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

We are all consumers.

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."

Yes, for capital owners.

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.

I'm not saying workers aren't necessarily overworked etc. I'm just saying that's not what this word and concept is about. This concept is about capital owners.

It would hardly have become a popular slang term on the Chinese internet if it were only about the worries of a small minority of capital owners. Any kind of excessive competition dynamics may be described as neijuan. I would like to give you some social media usage examples, but Weibo is censoring the #内卷# hashtag. In any case, the Wikipedia article has examples involving students competing in exams and graduates competing on the job market, among others.

Like other comments on OP have pointed out, the term at this point is vague and used for various reasons.

But given the term's emergence in a country with a communist government, and the origin described by wikipedia, I think what I'm saying is more aligned with the term's origin.

Whatever the term means on Chinese internet sounds like standard (I'm sure partially valid) doomerism. I can accept they use it to describe that.

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.

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.

[1] https://github.com/996icu/996.ICU

Wow it’s a proper word for software engineering and platform complexity over the last 30 years.

I usually reach for Verschlimmbesserung [1] to describe that.

[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Verschlimmbesserung

Ah, good old v17g!

For docs, see also "Darwin Information Typing Architecture"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_Information_Typing_Arch...

Neijuan as a word has transcended itself; it now means many different things, to many different people, in many different contexts.

Semantic diffusion strikes again.

Learned a new expression today, thanks for the comment.

This reminds me of Santayana's quote: “Fanaticism consists of redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim.”

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.

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.

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.

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

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?

Yup, it's exactly the same.

> 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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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

> 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".

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

Involution is competition over a fixed pie. If the labor pool really shrinks, the pressure eases without anyone deciding to stop.

> 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.

"1920s style crisis of overproduction with Chinese characteristics"

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.

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