Seeing the Unseen

CHAPTER 8The Inflection Point

There had been a lot of changes and so people are concerned. But everything happens for a reason. So, I would like to say, all for common prosperity. Even I would like to say, common prosperity is built in the genes of Meituan.

—Wang Xing, founder of Meituan, 2021 Q2 earnings call

THE YEAR 2021 WAS AN exceptional, and tough, one for large Chinese tech companies. The successive waves of regulatory actions not only sent most tech companies' share prices into a nosedive, but also triggered a nationwide soul-searching from tech leaders to investors to operation executives.

After years of running fast and intensive competitions, tech in China is destined to take a break, reflecting on its social value and resetting for the journey forward.

To understand what happened in 2021, we might need to start from the paddy fields in Indonesia.

In the early 1960s, American anthropologist Clifford Geertz studied rice farming in the Indonesian islands of Java and Bali in great detail and published a book called Agricultural Involution: The Processes of Ecological Change in Indonesia. In this book he coined the term “involution,” which described the process in Java where internal and external pressures increased labor intensity in the paddies without increasing the output proportionally.

Or in simpler terms, everyone is forced to work extra hard for very little additional return.

What Geertz did not anticipate is that the term involution (内卷) would become the most ...