What is Nei Juan 内卷? Weibo Posts give good explanations

Nei Juan ("内卷"), yet another popular phrase among young Chinese individuals, has gained significant attention everywhere. It's such a phenomenon that scholars are just one step behind those in online media.




It seems that some online media have defined Nei Juan as involution, while others see it as the opposite of Tang Ping (my previous study on Tang Ping can be found here). Nowadays, young Chinese use this word on a daily basis. Whenever there is any topic related to competition, there are discussions about Nei Juan, or simply the word "Juan" is used.

Nevertheless, I started from scratch and did the bottom-up investigation again. Let's see what Nei Juan is about on Weibo.

Because this word has been around for a very long time now, I collected posts online mentioning the phrase "Nei Juan" spanning from January to December 2023. My goal was to cover usage throughout the whole year (as far back as I could do). I did not collect data involving just the single character "Juan" because it would return a huge number of irrelevant posts. In fact, searching for single Chinese characters is rarely a good strategy when scraping data.

This resulted in a corpus containing 60,564 posts. These posts are looking good:




Next, I followed the same pre-processing procedures as before - cleaning up the text, tokenizing the words, and training a fastText model on the data. 

Now, let's take a look at the first 100 words associated with Nei Juan:



It is very clear that Nei Juan is frequently mentioned alongside things like "Vicious competition" (1,2,3,8...), "Anxious" (5), "Formalism" (6), "Put a lot of pressure on children" (7), "mental internal friction?" (9), "Vicious cycle" (10)...nothing good here. I can relate to these words when thinking about topics like working in the system and Chinese parenting. 

In analyzing the data, I also found frequent mentions of terms like "PUA" (Pick Up Artist, 12, 41), which is now commonly used among young Chinese to describe manipulative relationship tactics. Additionally, there were references to "996" (17, 26), a term referring to the practice of working 9am to 9pm, 6 days a week, which represents the excessive overtime hours some companies require.

Many other words were on the list, including bad mood and other adjectives describing chaotic situations. 

Overall, these top 100 words associated with Nei Juan paint a concerning picture of the mental state of those caught up in this societal trend.




Location: Hong Kong

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