I was intrigued to read an article in the Guardian just before Christmas with this title:
What is neijuan, and why is China worried about it?
I did not know the answer. I read it.
Neijuan appears to literally mean, based on a broader reading, ‘to curl inwards'.
In English, the most appropriate translation is involution, but the term is used in a very specific context in its current Chinese form. It strikes me as representing an idea that has three specific meanings, and I stress these are my interpretations.
First, it represents the idea of a culture that has developed as far as possible. The ideas, beliefs and practices of that society have reached a point where they can no longer advance. It has no place further to go. The possibility that this might describe neoliberalism is obvious.
The second meaning is to describe the person within that failing system who realises that however hard they try, they cannot achieve within it. In a failing system, there is nothing for them to attain through their efforts. At best, that system can only preserve the positions of those already possessed, whether of possessions and status (for which, read power). There is no room to admit more to their ranks.
Third, in that case, the term describes the process of alienation that is now commonplace in what is called Gen Z - or those born between the late 1990s and the early 2010s. In the UK there might be ten per cent unemployment in this group when society would expect them to be in work, or in education or training. In China, estimates of this figure vary between 17 and more than 20 per cent, which is staggering.
I stress that these are not the usual dictionary definitions of involution. Nor are they exactly what I think the Chinese mean by neijuan. They are based on some reading around the issue and some personal reflection as to why the term might be so popular, which is because it reflects a state of hopelessness that undoubtedly exists, albeit this is being appreciated more by some than others.
What is the consequence of this for the discussion of vision I keep talking about? I suggest four things.
Firstly, the appreciation of the need for a new vision is timely.
Second, that vision cannot adapt, extend the life of, or be based on neoliberal thinking. That is dead, having more than outlived its usefulness.
Third, it might give a name to the required change, although this suggestion is the most tentative of these four.
Fourth, this really does mean we need to start again if we are to create a new economics and a new politics based on it. I am not for a moment suggesting that I am the first to recognise this. I am suggesting that those who do so are right.
In itself, that makes this idea interesting.
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It can be very difficult if not impossible to get your head around an idea from another culture – think Proust which (so I am told) can be translated into English but at the same time cant be.
But your translation certainly makes sense and seems very relevant to the current situation.
I can think of a local bakery that seems to be staffed by young people who I would expect to either be graduates or the sort of people who might have gone to University but chose not to. Instead they make bread and rather good coffee and cake from locally grown wheat which in some cases is from old ‘tall’ varieties.
I hope they thrive
We were all seduced into thinking the good government would set up a framework where the good capitalist would invest in the good company to create good jobs that produced good products that gave good lives.
The basic form of this arrangement was product maker >job provider > job taker>product buyer.
Tax was one of the firm anchors that made the above work with Fiat currency.
Marx said we made a fetish of money, but that transferred to the fetish of the good job.
You find nowadays people are happier in voluntary work, co-operatives, alternative communities and spiritual practices etc.
The challenge is how to modify that framework to allow these alternatives to be realistic alternatives for the masses. And if tax could play a role there. I suspect UBI could open up a lot, but it could open to capitalist exploitation too.
Extremely thought provoking – your musings resonate with me.
You might see my post this morning in response to your post on mental health on investment – so called ‘investment’ which in the West is actually more likely to be the investment in debt returns – rentierism. This is NOT investment as we think – the word is abused in Western market capitalism. It is just a price paid to access debt payment streams and enrich the buyer, a hedge against inflation for their wealth and an inflator for those coughing up.
I think that society in the West is curling in on itself because the system we have preserves the rich – it makes them comfortable, it works for them and they will simply cling onto it for as long as they can. Add that to their proclivity for funding politicians and political parties then you have a perfectly stable system set up and legalised for them. Why change as far as they are concerned?
This is the problem as I see it anyway. As long as we continue to let them buy into our lives under the false flag of ‘investment’ this will only get worse. Rachel Reeves please note.
Thanks PSR
I still think there’s a lot to be learned from the old marxist ideas of alienation and commodification, at least as reinterpreted by Frankfurt: that capitalism colonises, privatises not only the natural environment, but every aspect of our lives, trying always to turn what should be human relationships in our own homes and communities, or the kindness of strangers, into grubby commercial transactions; replacing the beauty and satisfaction of living a good life with empty longing for the latest gadget or dress of car, whose momentary attraction is lost the moment the next glossy advert hits our screens.
They are entirely valid ideas
“Every step and every movement of the multitude, even in what are termed enlightened ages, are made with equal blindness to the future; and nations stumble upon establishments, which are indeed the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design” (Adam Ferguson, 1767).
Vision assumes a wisdom that in execution we do not possess.
Neoliberalism, having destroyed so much, is now undermining itself. Having globalised the world economy it now wants tariffs, because it believes its own fictions. China, however is at scale, rewriting the script. While EVs are not growing sales in the West as fast as intended, EV sales are growing faster in China, and the technology developing fast with it. The reason isn’t tariffs; it is government investment. The CICS reported this:
“From 2009 to 2023, we calculate that Chinese government support cumulatively totaled $230.9 billion. Absolute funding annually was around $6.74 billion in the first 9 years of our analysis (2009-2017), as the sector was just getting off the ground. Spending roughly tripled during 2018-2020, and then has risen again sharply since 2021.
These estimates reflect the combination of five kinds of support: nationally approved buyer rebates, exemption from the 10% sales tax, government funding for infrastructure (primarily charging poles), R&D programs for EV makers, and government procurement of EVs. The buyer’s rebate and sales tax exemption have accounted for the vast majority of support for the industry (see Figure 2). That said, because of the high cost and desire to winnow the field of producers, the central government reduced the buyer’s rebate in 2022 and eliminated it beginning in 2023” (CICS, June, 2024).
Most of Chinese help has been focused on BYD.
The investment report analysis shows that the investment came in the form of sales tax exemptions, buyer’s rebates, government vehicle purchase, and R&D; with the majority on the first two. In the West the neoliberal obsession with markets ends in governments preferring to impose tariffs over Government direct investment. The problem is, the private sector will not ever take on the investment risks required, and tariffs end by protecting the long established, sunk private investment of car makers, as they gradually become technologically uncompetitive and out of date; and failing to achieve the dynamic industrial change required.
What is the next development? It appears it is likely to be driverless cars, and AI. I expect China will not hang around relying on tariffs to win that race, either. China taps into market capitalism because it knows from experience and history that there are a thousand ways to skin that cat; but they do not depend on blind faith in the comic absurdity of dogmatic neoliberalism. We do.
John
We may be poor at execution
But ideas still are the basis for all change
Richard
Further to my comment in reply to John S and Richard, by producing so much in house, BYD and its peers are able to produce relatively inexpensive and high quality vehicles like the Xiaomi SU7, which knocks Porsche and other rivals out of the park at a fraction of the price, another reason for the decline of Germany. Outside the west, Chinese vehicles are selling well and overcoming western competition, not that one would learn from the MSM.
It is a staggering achievement by the Chinese, making a mockery of those who criticise it on climate change.
But not in the way we expect or plan; and often by producing a travesty of what was acyually intended. Often we didn’t really understand the real problem we were trying to solve. The Law of Unintended Consequences has the same power as the Second Law of Thermodynamics (if not its social equivalent). Too often we then write the history in order to create the illusion that what was intended was delivered (a notable product of Britain’s own illusions about itself).
I am more optimistic than you, John. I think with good reason.
I don’t believe it is a matter of optimism, but simply of setting out an object that can actually be delivered as intended. That, at the very least demands we frame the problem coherently. Visionary thinking is easier, because it is difficult to test.
Thank you, both.
Some tidbits:
In the late 1990s, I worked for NatWest and observed how two clients, Nor(thern)Tel(ecom) and Sony Ericsson, hit the buffers. Chinese firms snapped up their former engineers and told to build the best possible equipment they can and let them, the management, worry about costs and when, expected to be long term, to make a profit.
A decade later, at the banking trade body and working around the world, I observed how Ford, GM, Saab and Volvo, amongst others, hit the buffers. Chinese firms snapped up their former engineers and told to build the best possible vehicles they can and let them, the management, worry about costs and when, expected to be long term, to make a profit.
Over 2009, I was part of the inaugural G20 and observed how China sent young officials on secondment to City firms and regulators. The youngsters learnt what no to do.
A year ago, a Mauritian cousin accompanied a Sino-Mauritian oligarch family to China and visited Huawei’s campus and a BYD factory. Please have a look online for the former. Huawei is a cooperative and includes the Chinese government as a partner / shareholder. The latter is automated and employs relatively few workers. Everything is done in house.
I’m not surprised by Chinese firms eating the lunch of rivals. Real engineering will always beat financial engineering. Please ignore MSM coverage.
I lean towards, John S.
Thanks
“Real engineering will always beat financial engineering”.
I love that line, and I wish it was true. In the market obsessed West, here is how it seems to me to work; especially in Britain. The financial engineers build cartels and monopolies, and when new technology threatens it is likely to be bought by the financial engineers with big capital stakes in the statuse quo; so it is bought out (or the patents bought); and quietly buried. When finance is dominant, it is only interested in protecting its investments. It will only invest in engineering, when there is no other (cheaper) option left. It works better on the United States, but only to the extent the anti-trust regulations function, and are backed decisively by government. I understand Lina Khan, FTC Chairman and famous for developing the “Anti-trust Paradox” which allowed digital platforms to escape conventional regulatory scrutiny, is trying to effect real teeth in policy; but in 2025, who knows (remarkably her supporters seem to have included both Vance and Elizabeth Warren……..)?
Financial engineering is what has brought neoliberalism down.
But it is also what neoliberalism is.
Following on this discussion on BYD, this was why I raised the matter; because it has passed Britain by, as if we were a 3rd world operation; a Freedonia looking for a Margot Dumont character foolish enough to bail it out, for nothing.
Major issues like EV, crucial for us are not even being addressed, but being spun with out-of-date ideas, dead before the Government can implement their cheap, guaranteed to fail policies (when there is a need for us to learn like beginners, even if it is well beyond us to replicate – but we need to think about how we can learn, and use what we can learn to use for our advantage, for everyone’s sake). Britain is becoming a Zombie State; the living dead determine not just policy, but the whole political agenda; and that is taking us to a very bad destination.
What I find so inexplicable about where we are at present, is the “voluntary” nature of our predicament (for those in power, I’m not saying it’s voluntary for the rest of us).
Whether it is global heating, interest rates, austerity, awful public services, or chronic increasing poverty, the government line is that there is nothing that can be done – and they issue public pleas, literally in some cases (Chris Bryant) for donations to GoFundMe appeals.
Having signed up years ago in opposition to the system that led us into this cul-de-sac, having become the government with a majority to die for, having their hands on the levers of power, to create money and spend it where it is most needed, to legislate, to control the central bank, to reform taxation, to repossess vital public infrastructure – they claim to still be helpless. They won’t admit that they don’t WANT to govern for the good of the people, instead they claim that they CAN’T!
Which is clearly rubbish.
Theresa May couldn’t govern because Corbyn took away her majority and her party split down the middle. What is Starmer’s excuse, with his huge majority and a party of cowed little clones?
Are they blind, stupid, stubborn or very very sick?
I think it was Spike Milligan who, talking about his own erratic mental health in “Hitler, my part in his downfall”, may have said it was a rational response to the horrors of war.
“Without a vision, the people perish” says the writer of Proverbs (28.19). He was clearly thinking about our current Labour government who have forgotten their duty, to uphold some basic laws about human decency, justice and our mutual responsibility to care for one another. It is their REFUSAL to govern that I find unforgiveable.
No pressure then, Richard!
No problem….
Thank you, Robert.
Further to Starmer, on Monday a note was sent to Buckinghamshire council managers, requesting that they keep calls to the police for help to a minimum as the Starmers are at Chequers and need protection. It’s only for this week as the Starmers are off to warmer climes for new year.
As two tier Keir operates in favour of wealth, it won’t surprise Richard and readers that, yesterday, Thames Valley Polic was heavy handed towards protesters, but not fox hunters, at the Kimblewick, down the road from Chequers.
Thank you to John S, above.
John: “I love that line, and I wish it was true.” I agree with John and am aware of examples. That was a generalisation on my part. One wonders if the competition from outside the west will lead to change in the west.
It will be interesting to see what happens to Lina Khan. She could have been given a longer stint by Team Blue, but they chose not to upset their donors like Google and Microsoft.
One last tidbit.
About 2010, the EU’s big three industries, the City, German engineering and French farming, began to meet, not for long, though. I often chatted with a Briton, another child of an RAF veteran, who had emigrated to Germany in the 1990s and worked in automotive. He explained to me how in a decade or two, Chinese automotive would eat German automotive’s lunch as the latter was not investing in the future, i.e. electric or hybrid, and preferred to, ahem, lobby for protection (“anti-dumping”), cheat (“defeat devices”) and (increasingly) sell poor quality at premia.
It’s the same with solar and photovoltaic and telecoms.
Germany really did sell itself very short
Thank you, Richard.
Yep. Another text book case, including an obsession with book keeping at the expense of infrastructure and condemning a big % of its people to poverty.
Exactly so – all for the sake of a balanced budget.
Thank you Colonel Smithers and others.
Yes – the West has forgotten what real investment is – that concept is concerned with long term goals and objectives – a form of building. The increasingly short-termist view as well as the Trojan horse of ‘theft by investment’ to effect a change of ownership and power in order to asset strip and realise ‘value’ – has undone even Germany it seems.
Here in the West nothing is as it seems anymore. Everything is an income stream for capital it seems – and that includes our democracy and our sovereignty.
We have to accept – and this bears in mind John Warren’s point – that for the rich and the capital system that serves and enables them, this is an efficient system for them. It works for them. This form of market works for a small number of people. It does! Just look!
And this is what they have always meant even though they have populised that concept and sold it to our politicians and many of us and made it into a socially desirable objective for everyone.
Except of course that it isn’t efficient for the rest of us, in fact it is totally contrary to how an inter-dependent society works.
Colonel Smither’s list of crimes of the German automotive industry resisting modernisation is instructive (lobby for protection (“anti-dumping”), cheat (“defeat devices”) and (increasingly) sell poor quality at premia) and can be applied to so many other markets and public services.
We have been lied to and misled at scale. In other words, the West is going to be undone by its own Neo-liberal based perfidy of which it has become an expert, an operator without peer. And that is nothing to be proud of. And the U.S. and Starmer can bitch about China as much as they want. It is our own leaders, helping their rich to find ‘value’ to exploit who have allowed this to happen – no one else.
The answer is only in re-discovering the joys not just of tax but of REAL investment (driving to one of our favourite walks today, we found two road closures in the Peak district due to roads suffering weather damage or lacking real budgets to maintain them. Their number is growing).
And then John Warren will quite rightly ask the key question: How do you ‘rediscover’ a real investment mind set as opposed to an extractive one?
I question whether this does really work for anyone. The whole edifce is fragile now.
That makes a lot of sense, its always fascinating to hear “inside” stories, and the closing comments about solar and pv/ batteries, explain why I found it so difficult in 2020, to research installing them in my house, and that there wasn’t a penny of gov help available, and I paid full 20% VAT on the installation.
Then there was the incompetent smart meter installation, & the lack of incentive to export electricity & minimal ability to control when to export, and the lack of local/community energy policies/infrastructure. What a recipie for stagnation and decline.
I like the way this discussion is going!
I’m late to the party. I turned everything off for a couple of days, and decided to re-read Graeber and Wengrow “The Dawn of Everything”.
If you haven’t read it, I recommend it, because it’s well-written, eye-opening, positive. But above all a hopeful reminder that “The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make and could just as easily make differently.”
https://www.newsfromnowhere.co.uk/page/detail/The-Dawn-of-Everything/?K=BDZ0049924661
Thanks
A reminder that 2025 is a Catholic Holy Year, which features the idea of Jubilee – with its subversive commands. about land tenure, slave manumission and debt cancellation.
The “haves” should be challenged with the radical teaching around Jubilee, while it is topical (although MSM will probably focus on photos of Holy Doors being opened by the Pope, rather than listen to any of his polemic around Jubilee debt cancellation or serious reflection on Jubilee theology) and all this as personal debt increases in the UK and rents/mortgages take up more of personal income, and impinge seriously on affordability of food and energy.
https://www.cbcew.org.uk/what-is-a-jubilee/
https://brill.com/display/title/34281
https://debtjustice.org.uk/
“By all means persuade some…”
Thanks
‘I question whether this does really work for anyone. The whole edifice is fragile now.’
This is quite true. But do not expect an epiphany from the rich too soon, because the handmaidens or middle men of it all – the banks – will continue to play on their fears and help sustain what is becoming the unsustainable by using nebulous terms like ‘wealth management’ and ‘investment’ and ‘credit default swaps’ and such like. And the MSM will continue – unquestioningly – to promote it.
Perhaps we need just a proper discussion with the rich? What are they scared of? The rich get preyed upon by shysters and fraudsters as much as anyone else. What are their fears? Just being ordinary? Being poor? Are these people the abused just getting their own back?
What you say is true because as the State rolls back on its commitments, the rich are driven by the same fears as we are – that they too will be neglected, at the mercy of some ‘other’. As the planet gets warmer, they have the money to adapt I’m sure they feel. The thing is that the rich have something many of us don’t: more money as a resource to fall back on. And remember this?:
“Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we
are. They are different. ”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald
If the rich are like this, then what are we dealing with here? How many rich dudes like Nick ‘The Pitchforks are Coming’ Hanauer do we need to turn things around?
How can we get the rich to see that whether they like it or not, this system that serves them will kill them too in the long run or at least cost them a hell of a lot of money. And for what? To be king of the castle on a burnt cinder of planet, surrounded by human suffering on an immense scale? Believe it or not, some of these people think that that is a price worth paying. And it’s really scary.
Because it shows that we are dealing with extremists. Not religious, nationalist or anything like that. These people are individualists who have unlocked access to power and whose sense of that power has grown exponentially unchecked for far too long. And the exercise of that power is through money. We need to confiscate more of that money. For their own good – as well as ours.
What is the way back, otherwise?
I think I did 126,000 words on that this year…..
@PSR
“How can we get the rich to see…”
As Stephanie Kelton never tires of pointing out, the rich will eventually run out of things to buy (shortly after inflation places the last few resources out of the reach of the rest of us) no matter how much “money” they have. (I see Ni*** Fa***e is now a paid lobbyist for gold – what folly!)
Floods will block their highways, and burst their sewers, hurricanes & cyclones will tear the windows out of their skyscrapers, the power and spare parts they need for their prepper hide-aways and air conditioners will run out, and not even Musk will be able to keep his private jet flying once the GPS satellites have failed.
It may be materially even worse for the rest of us, but we will have something denied to the rich –
each other, and of course our human decency.
Let’s hope we can shift towards a better vision before that happens, by convincing others of the failure of the old vision before it destroys too many of us and too much of our planet.
Yes a vision based on a new economics is most definitely and urgently required. Tinkering with the neoliberal ideology of free markets, deregulation, monetarism and balanced budgets is failing abysmally and Reeves, who is clearly a believer, is not, even if she gets the growth she keeps harping on about, is going to be able to stop the rot. My personal view is that the explanation and promotion of understanding of a new economics and its benefits to us all is paramount
Most interesting comments. They all beg the question: what to do? I’m not sure we “need to start again” – the Uk does not lack for talent, original thinking etc. What it lacks is (medium/long term) money to fund some of the good ideas that pop out regularly, whilst keeping the companies that develop them British. e.g. Graphene – atom thick carbon discovered by Brits – China likely to capitalise. What happened? Biotech, same story (as I discovered).
Part of the problem is the short term horizon on which those with money operate. However, there are those that know better than me on this and can comment more knowledgably.
I’ll have to persuade you….
As ever, stimulating food for thought, it’s high time we gave this inertia a name and it looks like you’ve hit upon it. And you are absolutely correct the time is right, we must make Real Hope, Real Change our target mission for the new year – for all our sakes!
Thanks