Competition in China is often far more cutthroat than in the United States. America has a handful of carmakers; China has more than 100 electric vehicle makers struggling for market share. China has so many solar panel makers that they produce 50 percent more than global demand. About 100 Chinese lithium battery producers churn out 25 percent more batteries than anyone wants to buy.

中国市场的竞争激烈程度往往远超美国。美国的汽车制造商数量屈指可数，而中国有100多家电动汽车制造商在拼命争夺市场份额。中国的太阳能组件制造商数量之多，以至于产量高出全球需求的50%。大约100家中国锂电池制造商生产的电池总量高出全球需求的25%。

This forces Chinese manufacturers to innovate, but it also leads to price wars, losses and bad debt — and that’s becoming a problem.

虽然这迫使中国的制造商们创新，但也导致了价格战、亏损和坏账，这正逐渐演变为严峻问题。

China is heading toward deflation, the often catastrophic downward spiral of prices that sank Japan in the 1990s. Its leaders are blaming a culprit they call “involution” (“neijuan” in Mandarin), a term that has come to mean reckless domestic competition. They want to rein it in by browbeating companies into keeping prices steady and instructing local governments to scale back subsidies.

中国正在走向通货紧缩，这种价格螺旋式下降的问题往往带来灾难性后果，曾在20世纪90年代导致日本经济陷入长期低迷。中国的领导人将这个问题归咎于所谓“内卷”，也就是无序的国内竞争。他们试图通过行政手段迫使企业维持价格稳定，并指示地方政府削减补贴来遏制这种现象。

It won’t work. At best, those are temporary fixes for China’s more fundamental problem. Its economy relies so heavily on investment for growth, rather than consumer spending, that it produces enormous surpluses that wreck profits at home and provoke trade wars abroad.

这些措施难以从根本上解决问题。它们充其量只是对中国更深层问题的临时补救措施。中国的经济增长严重依赖投资，而不是消费支出，这导致产能严重过剩，不仅在国内压缩了利润，还在海外引发了贸易战。

China’s infatuation with the term involution dates to the 1960s and the work of an American anthropologist, Clifford Geertz, who argued that Indonesia wasn’t able to feed itself because population growth had outpaced improvements in agricultural productivity. Geertz used involution — an anthropological term for a culture that fails to adapt and grow — to describe this doom loop. His analysis resonated in a China that at the time was struggling to feed its own people, the world’s largest population.

中国对“内卷”一词的关注可追溯到20世纪60年代，该词出现在美国人类学家克利福德·格尔茨的著作中，他提出理由说，印度尼西亚无法养活自己，是因为该国的人口增长速度超过了农业生产力提高的速度。格尔茨用人类学术语“内卷”来描述这种恶性循环，指的是一种不能适应变化的文化模式。他的分析在中国引起了共鸣，那时，这个世界人口最多的国家正面临着养活人民的困难。

The term gained traction in China during the pandemic, when young people used involution to describe the pressure they felt to get ahead in a stagnant economy. In 2020, a video went viral of a Tsinghua University student peddling his bike at night while working on a laptop propped on his handlebars. Posts related to involution were viewed more than one billion times by the following year.

疫情期间，这个词在中国流行开来，年轻人用“内卷”来描述他们在经济停滞时代感受到的生存压力。2020年，一名清华大学学生在夜里一边骑自行车、一边把笔记本电脑放在车把上工作的视频在网上广为流传。在接下来的一年里，与“内卷”有关的帖子的阅读量超过了10亿次。

Initially, older Chinese commentators dismissed this notion of involution, calling it a symptom of Western capitalism. Then, in 2024, Chinese manufacturers gushed red ink and exported goods they couldn’t sell at home at prices so low that America and Europe erected tariffs to bar them. The problem, Chinese officials argued, wasn’t the Chinese economic system. The problem was ruinous, or involuted, domestic competition. In July 2024, the ruling Politburo for the first time identified fighting involution as a priority. Five months later, a government-Communist Party economic conference pledged to “comprehensively address involution competition.”

起初，中国年龄更大的评论人士对“内卷”这个概念不以为然，称那是西方资本主义的症状。后来，到2024年时，中国的制造商们大量出现亏损，以极低价格出口国内滞销商品，以至于美国和欧洲不得不用加征关税来阻止这些商品的涌入。中国官员认为，问题的根源不是中国的经济体制。问题的根源在于破坏性的或“内卷式”的国内竞争。2024年7月，中国最高权力机构中共中央政治局首次把治理“内卷式”恶性竞争作为首要任务来抓。政府在五个月后召开的中央政经济工作会议上承诺“综合整治‘内卷式’竞争”。

This framing matters to Beijing, which has been criticized by the United States and Europe as exporting its manufacturing surplus at prices that bankrupt Western competitors. By repackaging its efforts as fighting involution rather than excess capacity, Beijing can argue it isn’t caving in to Western pressure, which a Chinese Embassy spokesman described as “naked economic coercion and bullying.”

这个表述方式对中国政府来说至关重要。美国和欧洲一直批评中国用导致西方竞争对手破产的价格出口本国制造业的过剩产品。通过把其努力重新包装为应对“内卷”而非化解产能过剩，中国政府可以强调，这样做不是屈服于西方压力。中国一个驻外使馆的发言人曾把西方压力描述为“赤裸裸的经济胁迫和霸道霸凌”。

In the United States, markets work out any oversupply through production cutbacks, withdrawal of credit and bankruptcies. China relies instead on government and party control. Turning to their old handbook, regulators have called in carmakers, bankers, cement producers and e-commerce platforms, among others, to warn against excessive price cutting. Officials are planning to create a polysilicon cartel to try to ease solar power price wars, and are revising price regulation to guard against what the state-owned Global Times calls “rat-race style” competition. Beijing is also signaling to local government officials they shouldn’t throw lifelines to money-losing local firms — a major shift in a longstanding economic policy on which many political careers have been built.

在美国，通过减少产量、收回信贷以及让公司破产，市场能解决供应过剩的问题。中国则倚重政府和中共的调控手段。监管机构按照传统治理方式行事，约谈汽车制造商、银行经理、水泥生产商以及电商平台等，警告他们不要过度降价。官员们正在计划组建一个多晶硅企业联盟，试图缓解太阳能产品价格战问题，同时，政府也在修订价格监管规定，以防止被官方媒体《环球时报》称为“疯狂式”的竞争。中央政府还向地方政府官员们发出信号，叫他们不要为亏损的地方企业提供帮助，这是一项长期经济政策的重大改变，地方官员们曾把自己的政治生涯建立在扶植当地企业上。

These kinds of interventions are almost always short-lived. In July, China’s investment spending plummeted, which the market research firm Gavekal Dragonomics argues could be the result of the anti-involution drive. Should that continue indefinitely, the economy would crater. The government would surely ease off before then.

这类干预措施往往收效短暂。今年7月，中国的投资支出速降，市场研究公司龙洲经讯认为，这可能是“反内卷”努力的结果。如果这个趋势无限期持续下去的话，中国经济会出现崩塌。政府必然会在危机爆发前调整政策。

Longstanding policies that encourage excess supply remain untouched. Local officials are still measured by how well the economy grows and how quiescent their citizenry remains. That, in turn, means keeping local companies afloat to ensure the steady availability of jobs and tax revenue.

导致供应过剩的长期政策依然未被触动。地方官员的政绩考核标准仍聚焦于经济增长与社会稳定。这反过来意味着必须维持地方企业的运转，以确保稳定的就业和税收。

About a decade ago, Beijing opened a similar campaign to reduce the vast oversupply of steel. Steel mills made a big show of taking furnaces out of production, sometimes blowing them up for TV news. The mills chosen were often obsolete and local governments continued to subsidize construction of more modern facilities. Steel production rose, as did U.S. tariffs to curb steel imports.

大约十年前，中国政府发动过一场类似的运动以减少钢铁供应过剩。钢铁厂大张旗鼓地停产了高炉，有时甚至为了上电视新闻而把高炉炸毁。被选择停产的高炉通常是老旧设施，而地方政府则继续为建设更现代化的设施提供补贴。最终钢铁产量不降反升，美国也为抑制钢铁进口提高了关税。

What China needs, more than political campaigns, is more domestic spending, which in turn would gobble up more of the excess supply. Western officials and some Chinese economists have made this recommendation for years, but China has resisted. Private consumption accounts for about 40 percent of China’s gross domestic product, compared to about 69 percent in the United States and 53 percent in manufacturing-heavy Germany. That’s in part because Chinese households save heavily to compensate for a skimpy social safety net.

中国当前需要的不是更多的政治运动，而是扩大国内支出，这才能反过来将更多的过剩供应消化掉。西方国家的官员和一些中国经济学家提出这个建议已有多年，但中国始终抗拒这样做。私人消费约占中国国内生产总值的40%，相比之下，美国的私人消费约占GDP的69%，在制造业强国德国，私人消费约占GDP的53%。消费不足的部分原因是中国家庭大量存钱，以弥补薄弱的社会保障体系。

There is no shortage of suggestions on how to stimulate Chinese consumer spending, ranging from income tax cuts to increasing pensions and health care coverage to selling off locally owned companies and awarding shares to every person in the province.

关于如何刺激中国消费支出的建议并不少，从降低所得税到提高养老金和医保覆盖率，再到出售地方国企并向全省居民分配股权等均有探讨。

So far, there have been only modest additions to the safety net, and Beijing is wary of reducing the state’s control over the economy and handing it instead to consumers. There is little reason to think this will change. China is likely to try to muddle through its anti-involution campaign hoping that importers, even the tariff-heavy United States, will swallow its excess goods.

到目前为止，中国仅有限改善了社会保障系统，政府对削弱国家对经济的控制、让消费者起更大作用持谨慎态度。几乎没有理由认为这种情况会改变。中国很可能会通过“反内卷”运动得过且过，寄希望于他国（甚至是对中国商品征收高额关税的美国）进口中国产品，来化解本国的过剩商品。

That may no longer be good enough to power growth. The risk is that China follows Japan into a period of stagnation from which there is no easy exit.

这种模式可能已难以继续驱动经济增长。风险在于中国将步日本后尘，陷入难以轻易脱身的长期停滞期。