SEPTEMBER 2025 – Op-Eds and “Guest Essays” increasingly are their own source of news these days – they don’t simply proffer opinions, like they once did. They share expertise and shed light on issues often missed by today’s newsrooms.
And a great example of that is former WSJ editor Bob Davis’s piece in the NYT on China’s preoccupation now with self-destructive domestic competition. There’s a term for it – involution – which was coined by a US anthropologist back in the 1960s. While China’s problem of government-protected enterprises is well known, its leadership’s use of the term “involution” was news. Not even the business publications like Bloomberg had reported on it, at least anytime recently.
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.
Davis does offer up one opinion after this: Such Chinese actions “won’t work.” But much of his guest essay explains and reports as if he was still writing in the business page.
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.
This is a good example of an authoritative voice delivering a lot of important news – but separate from the business section.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/23/opinion/china-economy-deflation-neijuan.html