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. 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. 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. The fury found an unlikely home: the Cockroach Janta Party, a satirical youth movement named after a Supreme Court judge’s comment comparing jobless graduates to cockroaches. For weeks, protesters held Jantar Mantar. On July 25, after activist Sonam Wangchuk’s 26-day hunger strike and nationwide protests, education minister Dharmendra Pradhan resigned. Analysis of the protests has focused on issues of social mobility. But the protesters were not necessarily asking to climb higher but why the ladder they were sold no longer leads anywhere. That is not blocked mobility. It is involution, the same self-defeating competition China named years ago. Both India and China built universities faster than the jobs a degree is meant to lead to. The result is credential inflation: a qualification that once cleared a queue now only lets its holder join a longer one. China has lived with this since the mid-2010s, with youth joblessness nearing 19 per cent before the count was quietly changed. Last year, the image of a Master’s degree holder driving a delivery scooter sparked discussion in China. India is seeing the same trend, only faster. Two in every three unemployed young Indians held a degree in 2023. Delhi still sells this as a “demographic dividend”. Why has China found a word for the phenomenon while India has not? Speed. China’s crisis crept in over years, slow enough for a society to reach for a term and argue about it. India’s exploded in a single exam season – a sudden event looks like a crime, not a condition. A crime has a culprit, and a culprit can be sacked. Involution cannot. You can see the confusion in the movement’s five demands: a new examinations act, a scrapped testing agency, a welfare fund for exam takers, parliamentary oversight, a students’ rights charter. Every demand is about how the exams are run. Not one asks how many jobs wait when the exams are over. The most powerful youth movement India has seen in years still cannot articulate what lies at the root of the malaise. That is why a resignation settles so little. Delhi answered an overnight eruption by handing over a minister. The next leak or hiring freeze will land as fresh outrage, not the same condition surfacing again, and the cycle resets. China’s problem is heavier, but at least it knows it is carrying the weight. Even so, Indians should take heart. India is meeting this moment earlier than China did: younger and free to argue in the open air. Naming a problem does not solve it, but it turns the conversation from who stole which paper towards the real question: why does a country produce millions of qualified young people it cannot yet employ? That could lead to industry, jobs and economic reshaping, rather than another committee on exam security. China found the word first. India found a movement quicker. Now it needs to find the right vocabulary. Unlike Kong Yiji, it still has time to change the ending.

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

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}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

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