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Home > Sociology and anthropology > Sociology > Work and labour > Involution: A Worker Inquiry Amid China's Youth Unemployment Wave(Hundred Flowers)
Involution: A Worker Inquiry Amid China's Youth Unemployment Wave(Hundred Flowers)

Involution: A Worker Inquiry Amid China's Youth Unemployment Wave(Hundred Flowers)


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About the Book

China’s hypercompetitive job market is stunting and distorting the lives of an entire generation. Forced into a cutthroat doom loop, the people interviewed in Involution highlight how they are pitted against their colleagues, assigned pointless or impossible tasks, and warped by hostile environments. In response to an antisocial work culture, forms of passive resistance have become endemic.

Through conversations with young workers from across China, the Gonglao Collective paints a haunting picture of involution’s chokehold on young lives.



About the Author :
Eli Friedman has a PhD in sociology from the University of California, Berkeley and has been on the faculty of the ILR School since 2011. His primary areas of interest are China and Asia, development, social movements, urbanization, and work and labor. He is the author of "China in Global Capitalism" (Haymarket 2024) "The Urbanization of People: The Politics of Development, Labor Markets, and Schooling in the Chinese City" (Columbia 2022) and "Insurgency Trap: Labor Politics in Postsocialist China" (Cornell 2014). His peer reviewed articles have appeared in ILR Review, Theory and Society, Development and Change, and China Quarterly, among others.

Review :
The workers in Involution are neither factory militants nor triumphant professionals. They are members of a generation of educated young people grappling with unemployment, overwork, and the growing sense that effort and reward have come apart. Their accounts offer a rare and compelling window into the experience of educated young people confronting precarity, downward mobility, and an increasingly uncertain future in China, issues with which American workers, too, are intimately familiar. When we read about China's youth unemployment crisis or the "lying flat" meme, we rarely encounter the lives behind the headlines. By gathering the stories of young workers - from a teacher in Hunan to a debt collector in Jilin - Involution offers us an essential and deeply human glimpse into their experiences. Thanks to Friedman's attentive translation, readers beyond China can come to understand the struggles that so many young Chinese face in their pursuit of dignified work and a decent life. A vital document of contemporary labor that finds, in eight Chinese lives, a story unfolding wherever a degree no longer buys the future it promised.


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Product Details
  • ISBN-13: 9781836742951
  • Publisher: Verso Books
  • Publisher Imprint: Verso Books
  • Edition: PBO
  • Language: English
  • Returnable: Y
  • Series Title: Hundred Flowers
  • Sub Title: A Worker Inquiry Amid China's Youth Unemployment Wave
  • Width: 140 mm
  • ISBN-10: 1836742959
  • Publisher Date: 20 Oct 2026
  • Binding: Paperback
  • Height: 210 mm
  • No of Pages: 160
  • Returnable: Y
  • Spine Width: 10 mm
  • Weight: 155 gr


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