On Chinese social media, neijuan or “involution” captures the grinding sense that everyone is racing harder but getting nowhere. State media now calls it “rat race-style irrational competition”. Parents buy tutoring hours for preschoolers, young professionals log “996” work weeks (9am to 9pm six days a week) and start-ups pour money into user-acquisition contests where winners are decided by who can lose the most. The result is pervasive exhaustion: more effort, smaller returns.

Neijuan is the product of structural forces pushing people and firms into escalating, largely zero-sum competition. Four dynamics combine to make it unusually widespread: a vast pool of entrepreneurial aspiration, a copy-and-scale business culture, state-enabled production and a credential-driven labour market.

China is an entrepreneurial country. According to Global Entrepreneurship Monitor data, up until 2019, the share of people aged 18-64 intending to start a business within three years stayed in double digits. Multiplied by 1.4 billion people, that yields an enormous number of would-be founders.

The World Values Survey (WVS) reveals a value gap. While British and French respondents largely reject being rich as a core personal value, Chinese respondents accept wealth as a primary goal far more readily and view market rivalry as a beneficial force. This echoes President Xi Jinping’s line that “China is not afraid of competition”.

However, markets do not expand at the same pace as the supply of entrants. The result is classic overcrowding: dozens of small ventures offering near-identical products and fighting for the same customers. Marketing spend, subsidies and hyper-competitive pricing become currencies of survival and a core lived experience of neijuan.

For decades, China’s growth model has centred on fast imitation, adaptation and scaling of business models. E-commerce and mobile payments boomed as entrepreneurs tailored global ideas to China’s vast mobile-first market. As economist Keyu Jin argues, China excels at scaling, cost-cutting “1 to n” innovation even though it is weaker at disruptive, breakthrough “0 to 1” invention.