It should be "involution" As an academic concept, "involution" means that a society or organization has neither mutation nor gradual growth. For a long time, it just kept standing still, consuming itself, repeating itself on a simple level, without making progress.

Involution, also translated as "over-densification", is a concept that has been regarded as "closely related to some characteristics of China society, with high frequency of use and wide influence" in the field of sociological research in China in recent years.

Extended data:

In the context of China, the concept of involution was first learned from the research results of prasenjit duara, a historian, on China's ancient economic life: prasenjit duara borrowed the word involution to describe the population explosion and the surplus of cheap labor in the Qing Dynasty, which could not drive technological innovation and made the ancient economic form of China stagnate in the stage of small-scale peasant economy for a long time.

Later, historian Huang Zongzhi summarized involution as a description of the economic state of "growth without development" in his book "Small-scale Peasant Economy and Social Changes in North China", which formed the consensus of China social science circles on the definition of involution.

As a result, the social sciences in China gradually extended the concept of involution to a wider range of research fields to analyze various problems existing in China society since the reform and opening up.