Business of involution: self-study rooms and work culture in China

ABSTRACT

Discussions of involution – a culture of overwork in China – have grown especially rife on the Chinese Internet, reinforced by a dismal outlook on employment. Translated from an academic term ‘involution,’ ‘neijuan’ references a contemporary structure of alienation experienced primarily by college students: a sense of being entrapped in a society without opportunities, yet having to endure an endless series of stressful competitions to carve a respectable life. Drawing from fieldwork and interviews, this paper examines the culture of involution through self-study rooms, places where people pay to study. Rapidly expanding in number since 2019, self-study rooms have become a popular tool used by youths to cope with involution. Modulating attentional capacities through design, these rooms assure users that they could study better, and excel in competitive exams and certification processes to find progression in life trajectories. However, in doing so, self-study rooms also normalize an alienated learning and work culture in China, framing the attentional discomfort of forced learning as gain, and the privacy of self-study rooms as forms of individualistic therapy. Users learn not only to push their bodies within these rooms, they also use it to weep privately, expelling pressures to return to ‘gainful’ behavior.

KEYWORDS:

• Self-study room
• education
• involution
• urban space
• labor
• China

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to express gratitude to Prof. Lin Zhang and Prof. Jack Linchuan Qiu for their valuable comments on a earlier version of this paper, as well as to two anonymous reviewers for their insightful and constructive reviews. This work is partially funded by the Graduate Research Support Scheme from the National University of Singapore and the Ministry of Education, Singapore, Academic Research Fund.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Changwen Chen

Changwen Chen is Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Communications and New Media at the National University of Singapore. He is a critical/cultural scholar interested in the social history of learning and work culture, and its intersections with technology, development, and post-socialist politics.

Renyi Hong

Renyi Hong is Assistant Professor of Communications and Media at the National University of Singapore. His research focuses on the field of labor, affect, technology, and capitalism. He is author of Passionate Work: Endurance After the Good Life (2022).