Advertisement
India
OpinionAsia Opinion
Gaurav Kumar
Opinion
Gaurav Kumar

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

China’s crisis crept in over years, slow enough for a society to find a term for the phenomenon and debate it, while India’s arose over a single exam season

3-MIN READ3-MIN
9
Listen
Protesters in Mumbai celebrate after Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan resigned following nationwide protests as part of the Cockroach Janta Party’s protest movement on July 26. Photo: AP
Gaurav Kumar
Gaurav Kumar is a researcher at the Centre for Professional Military Education in the United Service Institution of India, New Delhi.

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.
The graduate market runs on the same logic. Millions of people study harder and stack degrees, all straining for a limited number of good jobs. The tired reply was tang ping, or “lying flat”: a refusal to run the race at all.
In 2023, frustrated Chinese youth reached for something older and sadder. Graduates began posting about “Kong Yiji literature”. Kong Yiji is the titular character from a 1919 Lu Xun short story, a failed scholar who refused to take off his long robes for manual work and died with his learning intact. A century later, millions of young Chinese looked at their degrees and saw the same robe: a mark of status they could neither remove nor eat.
10:28
‘Let it rot’: surviving China's high unemployment and cost of living

India has arrived at the same place, just more suddenly, following allegations in May that questions from the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test – the single exam that decides who is allowed to train as a doctor – had been leaked.

Advertisement
Select Voice
Select Speed
1.00x