Since 2017, IT professionals have held the highest average salaries in China and are engaged in diverse roles spanning various levels of tech work. Despite their wage advantages, they face intense job market competition and opt to switch jobs to leverage their value or pursue higher salaries in an industry characterized by high uncertainty and mobility. To gain a competitive edge, many individuals turn to “neijuan.” Unlike its interpretation in the agricultural context as involution, neijuan in the workplace refers to internal cut-throat competition. However, given the inherent uncertainty of the IT industry, the outcome of neijuan does not necessarily guarantee success, prompting some professionals to abandon it. Existing research on neijuan primarily examines it as a social phenomenon, with limited focus on employees’ perspectives regarding their practices and perceptions of the term, as well as their reasons for embracing bujuan(not neijuan). By conducting 30 semi-structured interviews in Beijing, a city where the IT industry is highly concentrated, the research investigates how IT professionals perceive neijuan from an insider perspective and how some navigate work uncertainties by embracing bujuan. Using a qualitative approach, this study contributes to academic discourse by providing an empirical perspective distinct from media narratives. Findings reveal that both neijuan and bujuan are adaptive responses to the commercialization of labour in the Chinese IT sector. This research highlights the nuanced dynamics of competition and withdrawal in contemporary Chinese workplaces.

In the past decades, e-commerce platforms have brought significant transformation to not only economic activities, labor conditions, governance, social structures, and cultural production in rural China, but also how rural spaces are configured and experienced. Logistic distribution centers, despite foundation to e-commerce platform economy and providing a unique entry point to examine the materiality and spatiality of e-commerce platforms, drew little scholarly attention. The present study focuses on how logistic distribution centers shape rural land use and rural people’s experiences with space in northwest China. Inspired theoretically by platform infrastructure studies, I am conducting a long-term ethnographic fieldwork (with participatory observation and interviews) in Gansu province, northwest China. I argue that, firstly, in the process of transforming land use for logistic distribution center construction, although most participating parties (local government, developers, farmers, cadres) benefit economically, the interests are unevenly distributed with farmers having little power to negotiate the terms. Secondly, the new spatial experiences emerged for the landless farmers employed at the distribution center are highly gendered: for women working in warehouse, the cultural expectation for care work force them into heavily exploitative, gendered, and surveilled space; while for mostly male delivery workers, though experiencing the urban space with more collective cooperation and autonomy, they are still in a rather precarious position constantly at risk from uncontrollable factors in said space.