The word India’s ‘cockroach’ protests missed can be found in China

At Jantar Mantar, New Delhi’s designated protest site, India’s future spent weeks enduring the heat and demanding change. But what kind of change, and why?These were young people, many of them highly educated but still without a job despite sitting numerous government recruitment exams. Their anger was not because they had been cheated. It stemmed from worse: their qualifications had simply stopped meaning anything. China has a word for this dilemma. India does not, and that missing word matters more than either country understands.China has spent much of the past decade finding the words to describe what it is facing. The term neijuan, or “involution”, entered popular usage around 2021. It describes ruinous internal competition: firms pouring in ever more capital and labour, slashing prices to undercut one another yet winning no greater return. Effort rises, margins vanish and everyone ends up worse off.