瀚森外语新增“外刊精读”栏目~

 学习英语过程中，阅读外刊是必不可少的步骤。

许多朋友可能对阅读外刊存在心理障碍，认为其“太难”，一是难在“生词”过多；二是难在文化背景不够；三是难在越来越习惯碎片化阅读的我们无法耐心去读一篇英语长篇文章。

对此，我们开设“外刊精读”小栏目，带着大家一起进行精读分享~

中国“内卷”的一代

China’s “Involuted” Generation

【纽约时报 The New York Times】

导 读

本期节选自2021年5月14日《纽约时报》：China’s “Involuted” Generation（中国内卷的一代）。

内卷应该是这两年国内最火的词之一，无处不在的内卷让人难以喘息。很多高等学校学生用其来指代非理性的内部竞争或“被自愿”竞争。现指同行间竞相付出更多努力以争夺有限资源，从而导致个体“收益努力比”下降的现象。更形象地说，内卷可以看作是努力的“通货膨胀”。

在之前一部热播剧《小舍得》里，内卷从孩子开始，从成绩排名到课外兴趣班，孩子们也早早地被未来前途这座大山压住。而现实生活里，当竞争越来越大，而资源越来越少时，内卷就不仅仅只是简单的996了。你在生活中有被内卷过吗？

一起来精读一段吧~

原 文

The concept of China as a society beset byinvolution gained traction, last spring, on Douban, a social-media site popularamong college students, in a discussion thread called “985 trash.” The namerefers to Project 985—a consortium of élite Chinese universities similar to theIvy League—and the shared reality that many students at these institutions feellike “trash”: anxious, stressed, overworked, trapped in a status race. “Youngpeople can only see one way that they can make claims for their dignity and berecognized as a person,” Biao said. And, most often, that way is to earn topgrades, land a well-paying job, buy an apartment, and find a similarly high-achieving spouse.

The meme of involution has spread from college campuses to what is for manygraduates their next destination: China’s hypercompetitive tech industry. Techworkers have begun to sense the involution of their lives: those employed atlarge tech firms often work hours known as “996” (nine in the morning to ninein the evening, six days a week). Whereas “996” was once a badge of honor, thephrase is now uttered with ironic despair, and has swelled into new iterationssuch as “007” (working online twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week). 

beset：vt. 困扰；镶嵌；围绕

traction：n. 牵引；[机][车辆] 牵引力

consortium: n. 财团；联合；合伙

a status race：地位竞争

dignity：n. 尊严；高贵

meme：文化基因；弥母；表情包

hypercompetitive: 高度竞争的

badge of honor：荣誉勋章

utter：v. 说出；发出，表达；发射；使用伪钞

swell into：涌进

译 文

去年春天，在豆瓣这个深受大学生欢迎的社交网站上，一个名为 "985废物"的讨论贴让中国作为一个被内卷化困扰的社会的概念得到了重视。这个名字指的是 "985"——一个类似于常春藤联盟的中国精英大学联盟，以及这些学校的许多学生感到像 "废物"一样的共同现实：焦虑、压力、工作过度、被困在地位竞争中。"年轻人只能看到一种方式，他们可以为自己的尊严提出要求，被承认为一个人，"Biao说。而且，最常见的是，这种方式是取得优异的成绩，找到一份高薪的工作，购买一套公寓，并找到一个同样成绩优异的配偶。

内卷化的概念已经从大学校园蔓延到许多毕业生的下一阶段。中国高度竞争激烈的科技行业。科技工作者已经开始感受到他们生活的内卷化：那些受雇于大型科技公司的人通常工作时间被称为 "996"（早上九点到晚上九点，一周六天）。尽管 "996 "曾经是一种荣誉，但这个短语现在被说成是一种讽刺性的绝望，并且已经膨胀成新的迭代，如 "007"（每周七天，每天二十四小时在线工作）。

仅供学习参考，有兴趣的朋友们可以精读全文~

Last September, a student at Beijing’sélite Tsinghua University was caught on video riding his bike at night andworking on a laptop propped on his handlebars. The footage circulated onChinese social media, and shortly afterward more photos of other Tsinghuastudents—slumped at cafeteria tables, buried under stacks of textbooks—appearedonline. Commentators proceeded to roast the insane work ethic on display andtag the students as part of a rising generation of “involuted” young people.The cyclist became a meme—“Tsinghua’s Involuted King”—and a flurry of blogposts on Chinese social media criticized the “involution of élite education,”while an article published by the state-run Xinhua News Agency dissected the “involutionof college students.” By the time winter arrived, the idea of involution hadspread to all corners of Chinese society.

The American anthropologist Clifford Geertzhelped popularize the term in his book “Agricultural Involution,” from 1963, inwhich he analyzed Java’s economic response to population growth and Dutchcolonial rule. Geertz’s theory of involution holds that a greater input (anincrease in labor) does not yield proportional output (more crops andinnovation). Instead, a society involutes. The Chinese term for involution,neijuan, which is made up of the characters for “inside” and “rolling,”suggests a process that curls inward, ensnaring its participants within whatthe anthropologist Xiang Biao has described as an “endless cycle ofself-flagellation.” Involution is “the experience of being locked incompetition that one ultimately knows is meaningless,” Biao told me. It isacceleration without a destination, progress without a purpose, Sisyphusspinning the wheels of a perpetual-motion Peloton.

The concept of China as a society beset byinvolution gained traction, last spring, on Douban, a social-media site popularamong college students, in a discussion thread called “985 trash.” The namerefers to Project 985—a consortium of élite Chinese universities similar to theIvy League—and the shared reality that many students at these institutions feellike “trash”: anxious, stressed, overworked, trapped in a status race. Thethread grew as participants bemoaned the involuted job market (finance or dataanalytics—which path is more involuted?), criticized involuted entranceexaminations (taking and failing the C.P.A. exam five times), and lamented theinvolution of the post-pandemic economy. “Young people can only see one waythat they can make claims for their dignity and be recognized as a person,”Biao said. And, most often, that way is to earn top grades, land a well-payingjob, buy an apartment, and find a similarly high-achieving spouse.

The meme of involution has spread fromcollege campuses to what is for many graduates their next destination: China’shypercompetitive tech industry. Tech workers have begun to sense the involutionof their lives: those employed at large tech firms often work hours known as“996” (nine in the morning to nine in the evening, six days a week). Whereas“996” was once a badge of honor, the phrase is now uttered with ironic despair,and has swelled into new iterations such as “007” (working online twenty-fourhours a day, seven days a week). Like the students, tech workers are resistingan idea offered by the business world and the government: that the technologysector, fuelled by single-minded market competition and the relentless hustleof its workforce, will propel China into a future of wealth and ease.

It is an ideal that leads college studentsto work inhumane hours and drives young migrant workers to hustle on behalf ofMeituan, an e-commerce and delivery-service company with a “victory or death”ethos. It also underlies the ruthless tactics of the tech industry, includingsmear campaigns and shameless copying of competitors. And, yes, China certainlyhas been transformed by technology: with a swipe on a phone, the modern workercan order a scallion pancake to her doorstep and hail a Didi driver to wherevershe wants to go. Facial-recognition cameras take attendance at schools, andalgorithms help allocate work tasks. But many tech workers, having scaled andoptimized their lives, sense that they have become just like their devices:interchangeable and emblazoned with a sheen of productivity, for no real higherpurpose.

Some young Chinese have embraced sang—anattitude of sardonic apathy and nihilism. “I wanted to fight for socialismtoday,” Zhao Zengliang, a twenty-seven-year-old sang Internet personality,wrote in a representative post. “But the weather is so freaking cold that I’monly able to lay on the bed to play on my mobile phone.”

Naming a condition like involution is anact of liberation and a move toward a cure. The problem with involution is thatit has become ubiquitous. It was one of the most commonly used Chinese words of2020, and has been deployed to describe many things. I’ve read about theinvolution of blockchain, team-building events, the logistics industry, M.B.A.applications. I’ve encountered a Marxist take on involution, a Weberianreading, and even a Confucian interpretation. I’ve learned about the involutionof online games—a gamer ethos that has sucked out the spirit of play—and theinvolution of the marriage market, a process through which single people fightover a dwindling pool of worthy mates.

Instead of allowing our words to“deteriorate into a slush of vague intention,” as Rebecca Solnit wrote, what ifwe named things with greater truth and precision? What if people called thebrutal hours imposed by the tech industry “corporate feudalism” and thedangerous demands placed on delivery workers a form of exploitation? What ifthe students toiling away in front of their computers, depleted and tired, arenot involuted but, rather, to borrow a phrase from the late David Graeber,victims of a profound “spiritual violence?” What if we used a more explicitterm to describe the effects of an involuted system, such as, say,“technocapitalist authoritarianism?”

Last December, a twenty-two-year-oldemployee surnamed Zhang at the e-commerce company Pinduoduo collapsed on theground in the middle of the night, on her way home from work, and died sixhours later, apparently from exhaustion and overwork. Two weeks later, anotherPinduoduo employee leaped to his death, during a visit to his parents,reportedly after he was fired for criticizing the company’s work culture. Inresponse to an outpouring of anger and grievance, the company appeared todismiss Zhang’s death, posting a comment on its official social-media account:“Who hasn’t exchanged their life for money?”

In many ways, China’s affliction ofinvolution is no different from America’s cutthroat meritocracy. But China’scrisis is unique in the severity of its myopia and its methods of entrapment.The young high schooler, disillusioned with the monotony of school, cannoteasily access subversive subcultures or explore alternative ways of living,because, increasingly, that information is deemed “vulgar” or “immoral” andbanned by the government, scrubbed from the digital sphere in the name of“promoting positive energy.” The delivery driver, seeking better workingconditions, can’t protest his grievances or organize his fellow workers in anindependent union, because he rightly fears that he will be detained. Thedisillusioned office worker, instead of taking action, will more likely sinkdeeper into his desk chair.