Zeitgeist


A China syndrome?


‘NEIJUAN’ IS A CHINESE BUZZWORD FOR AN INVOLUTION THAT IS APPARENT IN THE UK TOO. BUT CAN GOOD MANAGEMENT CHANGE THE MOOD OF THE WORKFORCE?


This mood has occurred in many generations and


many countries before but, after the introspection and change of perspective induced by Covid lockdowns, it has spread globally and seems particularly acute in the UK where the level of economic inactivity has remained stubbornly high since the pandemic, higher than in many of our competitors. The usual explanations - Britons have grown lazy and/or ill, that benefits are too high and too easy to get - don’t quite resolve this conundrum. But ‘neijuan’ could certainly be part of the problem. Last September, a survey by the Policy Institute at


THE OBVIOUS REMEDY TO NEIJUAN, DEMOTIVATION AND BULLSHIT JOBS, IS TO PROVIDE WORK THAT HAS A MEANING


Not content with inventing gunpowder, the compass and printing, the Chinese coined a term, seven years ago, to define a malaise that has since gone global. The term ‘neijuan’ - which comes from the characters for ‘inside’ and ‘rolling’ - describes a kind of stasis where life turns inward. In the West, we sometimes call this being involuted. In China, the buzzword describes a system where young people increasingly feel compelled, by a hypercompetitive environment at school and in the office, to work inhumane hours, without any end result. This syndrome is also referred to as ‘996’ - referring to a working culture where staff work 9am-9pm six days a week.


‘Neijuan’ is also used to describe the effects of this regime - burnout. The word went viral on Chinese social media when a photo was posted of a student using his laptop while cycling to university in Beijing. In an attempt to opt out of the rat race, some young people advocate ‘tang ping’ - literally ‘lying flat’ - which, for some, means not working at all, but for most means making time to unwind.


26 | June/July 2024


King’s College, London, found that only 39% of Britons believed that hard work leads, in the long run, to a better life. (In comparison, 55% of Americans said it did.) British Millennials, born in the early 1980s to the mid-1990s, were even more sceptical about work with only 14% believing it should always come first. The well-known anthropologist Dave Graeber, who died in 2020, would not have been surprised by these findings. As he asked in his 2018 book ‘Bullshit Jobs’, “Could there be anything more demoralising than having to wake up in the morning five out of seven days of one’s adult life to perform a task that one believes does not need to be performed, is simply a waste of time or resources, or even makes the world worse?” John Maynard Keynes, the great British economist, had argued that technology would, ultimately, ease this burden and make workers more productive. In reality, Graeber said, it had just created roles that didn’t need to exist, such as people who earn a living by copying and pasting emails. This tendency inspired one of Chandler Bing’s best one-liners in the sitcom Friends: “I gotta get to work. If I don’t input those numbers … Doesn’t make much of a difference.” This only accentuated the problem, he suggested, because companies, business owners and managers were already quite adept at creating meaningless jobs, the classic example being a museum security guard hired to protect an exhibition room that was always kept empty. As the guard told Graeber: “To keep my mind sharp and attention undivided, I was forbidden any form of mental stimulation, like books, phones, etc. As nobody was ever there, I sat still and twiddled my thumbs for seven and a half hours, waiting for the fire alarm to sound. If it did, I had to calmly stand up and walk out. That was it.” The obvious remedy - so obvious that many managers completely ignore it - to ‘neijuan’, demotivation and bullshit jobs, is to provide work that has a meaning. Obviously, this is easier in some lines of work - charities, for example - than others, but employers can provide meaning in a different way. To address the Chandler Bing question, they could reassure an employee that their work has purpose, by giving them a sense of their place in the broader scheme of things, recognising and rewarding their efforts and discussing their future paths. In business today, we often overcomplicate things but the cure for ‘neijuan’ can be summed up in one two-word term: ‘Good management.


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28