Green Involution

The Mao-era development of hybrid rice—known as China’s Green Revolution—is one of China’s best-known scientific achievements. For young rice scientists in contemporary China, however, this heroic past contrasts sharply with their struggles to keep pace in increasingly competitive scientific professions. Engaging with the anthropology of time, we argue against treating their experience as an inevitable response to the global acceleration of academic work. Instead, young rice scientists struggle to synchronize the divergent tempos of the contemporary scientific career with experiments set to the rhythms of the rice plant. Drawing on a current Chinese buzzword, we argue that young scientists are experiencing neijuan (involution), a pattern of growing intensity and complexity of work that yields diminishing returns. Philosophers have issued manifestos for “slow science,” but anthropological inquiry illuminates the locally specific patterns of temporal mediation that are pulling scientists out of sync.