I heard the same complaint nearly the whole month of June, which I spent with my family in Beijing, Shanghai, and cities and villages in Jiangsu, Hebei, and Yunnan provinces. It seemed that everyone we met, aside from pensioners and government employees, felt they were working harder and harder for smaller rewards. Many of them mentioned the word “involution”—which I’d been reading about from afar since 2020—but it also seemed as if life in China had never been this good.
lørdag 29. august 2026
App Life in China Notes on a Long-Delayed Return to China
“It’s really tough doing anything in China right now,” my friend told me. He’s a serial entrepreneur in Shanghai with a locked-in grin. We were waiting for our food in a Taiwanese restaurant in a lovingly-renovated toy factory in Shanghai. The place was really nice but it was about half full.
I heard the same complaint nearly the whole month of June, which I spent with my family in Beijing, Shanghai, and cities and villages in Jiangsu, Hebei, and Yunnan provinces. It seemed that everyone we met, aside from pensioners and government employees, felt they were working harder and harder for smaller rewards. Many of them mentioned the word “involution”—which I’d been reading about from afar since 2020—but it also seemed as if life in China had never been this good.
I heard the same complaint nearly the whole month of June, which I spent with my family in Beijing, Shanghai, and cities and villages in Jiangsu, Hebei, and Yunnan provinces. It seemed that everyone we met, aside from pensioners and government employees, felt they were working harder and harder for smaller rewards. Many of them mentioned the word “involution”—which I’d been reading about from afar since 2020—but it also seemed as if life in China had never been this good.