Let's talk about why Chinese society is so brutally competitive.
Some say it's because China isn't rich enough yet. Others blame the political system. But before you settle on an answer, look at South Korea.
South Korea: per capita GDP of $35,000. A vibrant democracy. A cultural juggernaut that conquered global entertainment with K-pop and K-dramas. And yet South Korea is more cutthroat than China.
In 2024, South Korea's after-school tutoring participation rate hit 80%. The average participant spent 592,000 Korean won per month on private cram schools. That's roughly $450 USD a month, in a country where the average urban apartment costs a fortune.
You think Chinese families are obsessed with the gaokao -- China's college entrance exam? Compared to Koreans, the Chinese look almost relaxed.
On Korea's national college entrance exam day, the entire country shifts gears:Work hours are delayed. The stock market opens late. Military exercises are suspended. Police cars line the streets, ready to escort late students to their exam halls.And during the 35-minute English listening section, every single airport in the nation halts all flight takeoffs and landings.
A Competition That Kills
How fierce is South Korea's exam culture?
For Koreans aged 10 to 39, the number one cause of death is suicide.South Korea holds the highest suicide rate in the entire OECD.
But what has all this collective grinding actually produced?
Among South Koreans aged 25 to 34, a staggering 71% have attended university. A college degree is now the baseline, not a credential. On average, a Korean college graduate earns only 31% more than a high school graduate. Youth employment among the highly educated sits at 80%, below the OECD average of 87%.
Everyone is running harder. Almost no one is winning more. This is the definition of fruitless competition.
Japan Is Not the Exception -- It's the Preview
You might object: But Japan isn't competitive anymore.
True. Japanese youth today are low-desire. They don't buy homes. They don't marry. Japan's Cabinet Office counts 1.46 million hikikomori -- adults who have withdrawn from society, rarely leaving their rooms.
But forty years ago, Japan had the most brutal exam competition on the planet -- so brutal that the Japanese coined the term "examination hell" (juken jigoku).Today's Japanese youth aren't exceptions. They are simply what people look like after the race has broken them.
Japan is not East Asia's exception. Japan is East Asia's preview.
Moloch: A Trap With No Villain
Whatever causes East Asia's hyper-competition, it must be something shared by China, Japan, and Korea -- and either absent or weak everywhere else.
That something is called Moloch.
Moloch was a Canaanite deity to whom devotees sacrificed their own children. In the modern era, the name has come to represent something far more chilling: a system that devours the very people who sustain it.
In 2014, American psychiatrist Scott Alexander published a viral essay titled "Meditations on Moloch," transforming the ancient name into a social-science concept.
Moloch, as Alexander defines it, is a "multipolar trap:"Every individual makes a perfectly rational choice for themselves. Yet when all those rational choices add up, they push the entire group toward an outcome nobody actually wants.
An arms race is Moloch: every nation buys weapons for security, and together they manufacture greater insecurity. Social media algorithms are Moloch: every platform optimizes for rage-engagement, and together they manufacture a more polarized society.
The Mechanics of Moloch
1. Multiple competitors face a single metric that determines victory -- test scores, rankings, profit, click-through rates.
2. Someone discovers that sacrificing an unmeasured value -- health, childhood, honesty, sleep -- can boost the measured metric.
3. They gain a temporary edge. Others must either match them or fall behind.
4. A new baseline forms. Everyone's relative position is roughly the same as before. But everyone's absolute well-being has deteriorated.
Notice: there is no villain in this story.No one wants the outcome. Everyone knows the outcome is bad. But no one dares to stop first.That is what makes Moloch genuinely terrifying.
Tournament Theory: Why Regulation Fails
The root problem of the Moloch trap is that it is, from the very beginning, a single-metric game.
Economists have a framework called "tournament theory:" when rewards are allocated by relative rank rather than absolute contribution, human effort shifts from creating value to jockeying for position.
Moloch is a single-lane tournament. Everyone's fate is compressed into one leaderboard.
The South Korean government mandated that cram schools close by 10 PM. The result? Large group classes morphed into expensive one-on-one tutoring. Household spending on private education kept hitting record highs.
As long as the "single lane" remains intact, every attempt to coordinate or restrict competition is merely rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.
How East Asia Built a Single Lane to Rule Them All
Factor One: 1,300 Years of the Imperial Exam
In the East Asian mind, the single lane looks like this: ace the national exam, get into a top university, land a stable white-collar job, buy an apartment. And the single metric that governs this lane is: test scores.
China's keju -- the imperial examination system -- was the purest single-lane tournament in human history. For thirteen centuries, a vast empire compressed every path to elite status into one narrow pipeline.
"Of all trades, reading is the most noble" -- this wasn't poetic flair. It was the system's operating manual.Scholars, farmers, artisans, merchants: only the scholar had access to power, wealth, and prestige. And the only road to scholarship was through the exam.
In the Ming and Qing dynasties, even a merchant who accumulated staggering wealth could never truly enter the elite. The best he could do was purchase a minor official title. Merchant families ran a two-generation cycle: one generation earns money, the next generation buys examination tutoring. Money itself didn't count. Money converted into examination credentials was what counted.
Factor Two: The Great Leveling
In the mid-20th century, all three East Asian nations underwent what historians call "the Great Leveling."
China achieved it through revolution: land reform eliminated the landlord class, and state takeovers absorbed the capitalist class. Japan's war defeat triggered zaibatsu dissolution and land reform. Korea, colonized by Japan, saw its aristocracy lose all foundation; the Korean War then obliterated whatever wealth gaps remained.
The result of all three upheavals was the same: hereditary hierarchies were demolished. Everyone started from the same line.
But when the starting line was flattened, the running lanes were flattened too -- into one.
No aristocracy. No guilds. No landed estates. No family businesses that pass meaningfully across generations. What compound interest could ordinary people invest in? Only one thing: educational credentials.
Single value + Equal opportunity = Universal tournament.Here is the counterintuitive truth:The rat race exists not because society is unfair. The rat race exists because society is fair.Caste-locked societies don't have rat races. Feudal societies don't have rat races. Their people are desperate, yes -- but they don't run.The rat race is a punishment designed specifically for societies where everyone believes they have a shot, everyone feels they should compete, and everyone is comparing themselves to everyone else.
The gaokao is the fairest exam in the world. That is exactly why it is the most brutal exam in the world.
The Four Bills of Involution
The Chinese term "neijuan" -- "involution" -- was originally introduced by historian Philip Huang to describe Ming-Qing small-scale farming: the land stayed the same, the population grew, and peasants poured ever more labor into the same plot of soil. Each additional unit of labor yielded a thinner return. Huang called it "growth without development."
Sound familiar? Everyone stops tutoring, universities admit the same number of students. Everyone tutors frantically, universities still admit the same number of students. So what exactly are we tutoring for? Did your actual professional competence genuinely improve because of those cram sessions?
Everyone is working harder. No one is safer.That is Moloch.
Bill One: Credential Inflation
American sociologist Randall Collins developed the theory of "credential inflation." It works exactly like monetary inflation: the more degrees in circulation, the less each degree is worth -- but nobody dares to stop printing them. Yesterday a bachelor's degree was an advantage. Today it's a gate ticket. Tomorrow a master's is just a queue number.
Bill Two: Talent Misallocation
Even if you treat people as tools, a human being isn't a single number. A person is a vector of capabilities: abstract reasoning, manual dexterity, aesthetic judgment, emotional intelligence, organizational skill, risk tolerance, storytelling ability.
A single-lane tournament projects this multi-dimensional vector onto one axis: test scores. Information is inevitably destroyed in the projection. A child who might have become an extraordinary chef, carpenter, salesperson, or nurse is defined by that single number as a "poor student." Their rational response? Abandon every other dimension.
One study analyzed 3.85 million patents across 31 Chinese provinces and found a striking pattern: the tighter a province's social norms -- meaning the less tolerance for deviating from the standard path -- the fewer radical innovations it produced, and the more incremental innovations it generated.The more a society worships the single lane, the better its people become at running the known lane to its absolute limit -- and the worse they become at discovering lanes that don't look like lanes yet.This is probably why China excels at going "from 1 to N," but struggles at going "from 0 to 1."
Bill Three: Lying Flat
Some say "lying flat" (tangping) is rebellion against the rat race. But think about it: someone who genuinely doesn't care about the lane -- would they "lie down"? No. They'd be off doing something else entirely.
Lying down is a posture oriented toward the lane.
The person lying flat doesn't not care. They care too much. They care about the lane, and they've concluded they can't win -- so they protect themselves with "I'm not running." You can't say I lost, because I never entered.
Bill Four: Children -- The Heaviest Bill of All
Moloch's original meaning was a god who devoured children. This is how the modern Moloch eats them --
• First it devours childhood: cram schools from kindergarten through senior year.
• Then it devours youth: university, then grinding for GPA, internships, grad school entrance exams, civil service exams.
• Then it devours sleep: both Japan and Korea circulate the saying "four hours of sleep, you pass; five hours, you fail."
• Finally it devours the next generation: marriage requires housing, and housing is this tournament's trophy. Raising children requires educational investment, and that investment is the entry fee for the next tournament.
Young people look at the ledger and think: this bill is too expensive. I'll pass on having kids.
South Korea's total fertility rate in 2024 was 0.75 -- the lowest on Earth.What does that number mean?For every 200 young Koreans forming 100 couples, they produce 75 children. The next generation is barely over one-third the size of their parents' generation.One more generation? Those 75 people will leave behind roughly 28 children.This is demographic self-annihilation.
But the young people choosing not to have children -- do they dislike kids? On the contrary. Many of them love children so deeply that they refuse to bring a child into a world where that child's existence means being fed into the machine.
Declining fertility is East Asian youth's final act of resistance against Moloch.
The Way Out: From One Lane to Many
The fundamental cure for this trap is transforming one lane into many.
Success on this lane counts as success. Success on that lane counts as success too. Society must legitimize more than one way to live a good life.
This Is Value Pluralism
"Value pluralism" sounds like empty politeness -- be nice to minorities, tolerate different people, right?
Wrong.
Value pluralism isn't a posture. It is a society's immune system. It is the antonym of involution.Involution: everyone crowding toward the same definition of success.Value pluralism: a society that can finally accommodate many definitions of success.
Europe and America don't grind the way East Asia does because they preserved value pluralism. They were never flattened into a single lane. Churches, guilds, labor unions, immigrant communities, deliberate outsiders like the Amish, surviving aristocracies in some nations -- each represents a different way to live a meaningful life.
Change Has Happened Before
In 1876, Japan's Meiji Restoration abolished samurai privileges. For the first time, a farmer's son could become an officer or an engineer. Talent exploded outward.
In 1905, the Qing dynasty abolished the keju. Countless brilliant minds were suddenly released. Within a generation, they had become scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs, and thinkers. You could argue that modern China was built on the ruins of the imperial examination system.
Today, two-thirds of Swiss youth enter vocational training after junior high. In Germany, a master craftsman's qualification carries national prestige equal to a university degree. This isn't forced tracking. The key is that income gaps between professions remain modest -- blue-collar work carries genuine dignity, so people don't all pile into universities.
Pulling Fuel from the Fire
Society eventually self-corrects.
Restricting competition is rearranging deck chairs. Value pluralism is building new ships. Population decline is pulling fuel from the fire.
In 2025 and 2026, China's gaokao registration numbers have declined for two consecutive years. With fertility rates this low, applicant numbers will only keep falling. Universities are already proactively recruiting students. The dynamic is reversing.
Meanwhile, as the wage premium for degrees shrinks year after year, some college graduates are returning home to start businesses, or even becoming "full-time children" -- paid modestly by their parents to manage household affairs. The lane's attractiveness is fading.
Humans are fundamentally alive.Every person who refuses Moloch is charting a path for society.A great civilization cannot claim that only one kind of life is worth winning.
