Involution: A Worker Inquiry Amid China's Youth Unemployment Wave

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.

In the two short years since its emergence, Gonglao has become the single most important source of information and analysis about workers and labor strugglesin China. An informal network of young researchers and activists throughout China and inthe diaspora, they have depended on a committed core of volunteers to conduct research.Their website (工劳网) provides nearly daily updates on labor issues from around thecountry based on information gleaned from the internet.

Eli Friedman has a PhD in sociology from the University of California, Berkeley and has beenon the faculty of the Industrial Labor Relations School since 2011. He is also the faculty advisor for the Cornell Labor Action Tracker, which is the only comprehensive database of strike events in the United States. His previous books include The Urbanization of People:The Politics of Development, Labor Markets, and Schooling in the Chinese City (Columbia 2022) and Insurgency Trap: Labor Politics in Postsocialist China (Cornell 2014). He also co-edited the English translation China on Strike: Narratives of Worker Resistance (Haymarket, 2016).