The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
14 — Wednesday, November 4, 2020
statement
G
aoyuan Liu’s suggestion to
compare answers was reject-
ed outright after a difficult
math exam. “Don’t involute yourself,” her
classmates told her. Gaoyuan Liu, an LSA
transfer student who then studied at one
of the most prestigious universities in
China, never felt the ubiquitous presence
of the word “involution” in her and her
peers’ lives as much as she did that day in
the classroom.
The term “involution” was popularized
by Clifford Geertz, an eminent cultural
anthropologist who used it as a descrip-
tion of the agricultural process in which
refinements of wet-rice cultivation led to
more and more intricate labor use, with-
out creating significant progress in other
social sectors such as technology and poli-
tics. The use of the word has unexpected-
ly stepped out of the academic world and
gained prominence among young people
in China in recent years.
In China, this term has been borrowed
to describe the phenomenon where the
competition for social and economic re-
sources is intensified. With more and
more people opting into this game, the
standard of “being average” increases dra-
matically.
“The result (of involution) is usually
that everyone puts more efforts to meet
the raised standard, but due to the fixed
amount of available resources, no one in
the competition yields better returns,”
said one of the most up-voted comments
on Zhihu, the “Chinese Quora.”
Involution didn’t make its entry to the
public consciousness until recent years,
though, as Gaoyuan recalled, her past 20
years of life had always been played out
under “the involution rules.”
“Enrollment rates of magnet elementa-
ry, middle and high schools are extremely
low,” Liu said. “Before getting into college,
I have already been trained to coexist with
and succeed in competition.”
Drawing
a
comparison
with
her
15-year-old sister, who is in eighth grade,
Gaoyuan said that there is an obvious in-
tensification in the trend of involution.
She said, “They are already learning and
taking exams that are originally oriented
towards college students … When I was in
middle school, I took two extracurricu-
lar courses or so every weekend, which is
already hectic. Now my sister’s weekend
schedules are fully packed by extracur-
ricular activities — unimaginable.”
For many young people in China, invo-
lution is sometimes an entrenched institu-
tion rather than a personal choice. For ex-
ample, at Gaoyuan’s previous university, it
is a written rule that the number of As as-
signed in every course, including A-s and
A+s, should be manipulated to fall within
a 30-percent quota.
Ting, a student at a first-tier university
in China, questioned the meaning of this
by-design competitive mechanism.
“Higher education should not only be
about getting good grades and building up
resumes. A 4.0 GPA isn’t necessarily in-
dicative of great command of knowledge.
But I can’t resist. I am afraid of falling be-
hind. I feel trapped,” She said.
Biao Xiang, a professor of social an-
thropology at the University of Oxford,
referred to this as “a competition with no
option of failure or withdrawal” in an in-
terview.
Behind this endless cycle of anxiety lies
the explosive growth of college degree
holders.
In China, the gross tertiary enrollment
rate rose from 3.1% in 1990 and 7.8% in
2000 to 29.7% in 2013, nearly a tenfold ex-
pansion compared to two decades ago.
“In the 1980s, the title of college stu-
dent itself equated the definition of ‘elite.’
Today, higher education becomes another
round of elitism sorting,” pointed out by
Jingjing Xu in an Sanlian Lifeweek article.
“In addition to the scarcity of resourc-
es, the monotonic standard of success is
an important reason,” said Changyuan
Qiu, a junior studying computer science at
the University of Michigan-Shanghai Jiao
Tong University Joint Institute.
This tendency is not endemic to Chi-
na. Between 2000 and 2014, the number
of students in higher education globally
more than doubled, rising from 100 mil-
lion to 207 million, according to a report
published by the United Nations Educa-
tional, Scientific and Cultural Organi-
zation together with UNESCO Interna-
tional Institute for Educational Planning
and UNESCO GEM Report. In the United
States, the growth is particularly remark-
able. According to the Census Bureau, re-
ported college enrollment has increased
elevenfold since 1940, from 1.5 million to
17.9 million.
Is U.S. higher education confronted
with the same trend of involution? Views
on this question run the gamut. Having
studied at both the University of Michi-
gan and SJTU, Changyuan thinks that the
minimum threshold grading scale com-
monly adopted by American universities
prevents the destructive competition from
happening. Under this system, students
are evaluated based on their own mastery
of the materials, not the comparison with
peers.
“At U-M, as long as you get a 93+ overall
score, you are guaranteed an A,” he said.
Fatma Müge Göçek, a professor of so-
ciology and women’s gender studies, at-
tended college from 1975 to 1978 in Istan-
bul, Turkey, came to the U.S. in 1981 and
received her doctorate from Princeton
University in 1988. She asserted that signs
of involution had been witnessed in both
Turkey and the United States in recent de-
cades.
“I think it is definitely involution: the
demand for degrees goes up constantly
while the supply of degrees can never
catch up with it, leading the education pie
to be more competitively divided among a
larger number of candidates,” Göçek said.
She warns that despite facing fierce
competition, Generation Y — also known
as Millennials — is likely to be the first
generation in recent American history
that makes substantially less than their
parents.
“Findings demonstrate that the U.S.
economic boom in the past is over — mil-
lennials will make 20% less than their par-
ents’ generation, and millennials with a
college degree will make about 40% more
than their less educated counterparts,”
she said. “This result is certainly partial-
ly due to involution, but it is also due to
global competition: other countries have
copied the U.S. economic boom, thereby
taking away larger chunks of business
from the U.S.”
Caught in the middle of overwhelming
competition traps and expected returns
in the gutter, how should college students
navigate education, mental health and
their future? The question demands not
only addressing the idea of involution, but
rethinking how we face it.
How involution
perturbs China’s
youth
BY YUEYAO ZHOU, STATEMENT CONTRIBUTOR
ILLUSTRATION BY EILEEN KELLY