“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.”
—Alex Press, labor reporter writing in Jacobin Magazine, the New York Times, and the Nation
“When we read about China’s youth unemployment crisis or the “lying flat” meme, we rarely encounter the lives behind the headlines. By gathering the stories of young workers – from a teacher in Hunan to a debt collector in Jilin – Involution offers us an essential and deeply human glimpse into their experiences. Thanks to Friedman’s attentive translation, readers beyond China can come to understand the struggles that so many young Chinese face in their pursuit of dignified work and a decent life.”
—Yi-ling Liu, author of The Wall Dancers: Searching for Freedom and Connection on the Chinese Internet
“A vital document of contemporary labor that finds, in eight Chinese lives, a story unfolding wherever a degree no longer buys the future it promised.”
—Eric Blanc, author of We Are the Union
