Involution

The Gonglao Collective is the single most important source of information and analysis about workers and labor struggles in China.Eli Friedman is a leading scholar of Chinese labor politics based at Cornell University. His previous books include 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).

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.