China's Involution and Our Own: What Happens When Hard Work Stops Working

There's a word in China, gaining prominence, that captures the sensation of running endlessly without getting anywhere: involution (内卷, nèijuǎn). It's the hamster wheel of modern life, where schoolchildren stay up all night cramming, office workers grind through "996" schedules (9 am to 9 pm, six days a week), and consumers outspend one another on gadgets and holidays, all without any real reward. Anthropologists first used the word to describe development that becomes more complicated without producing progress. Today, young Chinese use it to describe their reality.

The West has been here before, leading to Trade unions which emerged in the 19th century, and to Frederick Taylor's early 20th-century "scientific management," which then turned factories into stopwatch laboratories. Workers moved faster, but wages barely shifted. Taylorism didn't create unions, but it poured petrol on the fire. It hardened labour's resolve and drove demands for dignity, fair pay and safety.

In China, formal unionisation isn't the outlet. Instead, the backlash has been "lying flat" (躺平, tǎng píng). Rather than sprinting on the wheel, young people are stepping off it, opting for less stressful jobs, delaying marriage and home ownership, and rejecting the idea that success is measured by the number of hours worked. It isn't laziness. It's a refusal to waste effort when the rewards don't stack up.

What makes China different is scale: with hundreds of millions of workers at the heart of global supply chains, even small shifts in ambition or productivity ripple through its economy and the world's. Growth is slowing, youth unemployment has surged, and consumer confidence is weak. When people no longer believe that effort results in progress, ambition drains into disengagement and a focus on saving for safety rather than spending for growth.

And it doesn't stop at China's borders. When young Chinese consumers cut back on spending, it hits global brands that depend on them for growth, from luxury handbags to smartphones and cars. At the same time, China's factories often respond to weak domestic demand by increasing their exports. That flood of goods pushes prices down worldwide — good news for Western shoppers in the short term, but it risks trade disputes as governments rush to shield their own industries. Meanwhile, multinationals are quietly shifting parts of their supply chains to India, Vietnam and elsewhere to reduce their dependence on China.

For the West, there's a familiar modern-day echo. Today's gig economy often feels like involution in a different accent. Platforms promise freedom, but for many drivers, couriers, and freelancers, flexibility often feels more like waiting in the rain for the next app notification. They hustle for ratings and chase bonuses that vanish overnight, but the ceiling on earnings doesn't move. It's effort without reward, dressed up in the branding of Deliveroo and Uber. Unsurprisingly, workers are pushing back with strikes, quiet quitting, and calls for portable benefits.

This serves as a warning to Western leaders. Culture is often treated as a nice-to-have, expressed through posters, slogans and away days. But culture is the operating system of work. If it rewards hours over outcomes, you're wasting human potential. If your model extracts flexibility from gig workers without offering security, you're fuelling the next backlash.

The opportunity is there for anyone willing to design better systems. Organisations that measure outcomes, give people autonomy, and build environments where effort compounds into progress will win the best talent. Whether in Shenzhen, China, St Louis, Missouri, or Sheffield, UK, people will work hard if they believe it leads to a better life. Companies need to find a balance between customer convenience, shareholders' need for profit, and workers' need for flexibility and security.

And here's the line to carry into the boardroom: if all you reward is the appearance of progress, culture becomes a liability. The only thing that sustains growth is real productivity.

China's rise demonstrates that effort alone can drive astonishing growth, but its current struggles reveal that no economy is immune to stall points. For Western leaders, the lesson is clear. As the gig economy expands and traditional employment becomes more flexible, business models must do more than keep people busy; they must convert effort into genuine progress. Because when workers see only theatre, they step back. And when they see their effort rewarded with real outcomes, they lean in.

Photo by famingjia inventor on Unsplash

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