Week 3: 内卷: A Case Study in Viral Sociology

How a term for over-farmed rice paddies became the word millions of Chinese internet users reached for in 2020

8 March 2027

Outline#

• the 2020 meme moment: a student photographed biking while reading, captioned with 卷 (juan — “to roll,” to over-prepare past the point of benefit)
• gaokao culture and “chicken-blood parenting” (jiwa) as the training ground the term grew out of
• 卷王 (juanwang, “involution king”): the vocabulary’s one name for a person rather than a system — conferred by the competitors left behind, never claimed, and describing whoever set the new floor rather than whoever cleared the old one
• how neijuan (内卷) travelled from sociology seminar to group-chat shorthand in under a year
• what a term gains, and loses, on the way from academic paper to meme