Exploring educational involution: a qualitative study of stakeholders’ perspectives in Jiangsu Province, China

1 Introduction

1.1 The educational involution

Educational “involution” (内卷, nei juan, in Chinese characters, literally meaning inward-curling) has emerged as one of China's most discussed educational phenomena since 2020, representing a form of intensified academic competition that yields diminishing returns—where significantly increased inputs of time, effort, and financial resources yield progressively smaller gains in academically valued outcomes and overall development—while increasing student and family stress (Chen and Bao, 2022; Li, 2021). It is essential to distinguish this structural concept of educational involution from related but distinct experiences such as general academic pressure or examination competition. General academic pressure can be a personal experience and an individual phenomenon, while educational involution refers to a systemic and ecological condition.

Originally coined by anthropologist Alexander Goldenweiser, the term “involution” was initially introduced to social sciences research; for instance, Gothic architecture continued to develop through internal complexity due to having already evolved into a rigid form (Goldenweiser, 1936; as cited in Geertz, 1963; see also Hui, 2009). The term gained further prominence when Geertz (1963) applied it in his book Agricultural Involution in which he analysed Javanese agriculture, describing systems wherein an increase in labour does not always yield proportional output, such as more crops or any political or technological innovation, but only leads to intensification and greater social complexity. Geertz's theory captures systems where intensification yields only stagnation in productivity, technological capacity, and social structure without generating transformative growth.

Building on Geertz's foundational work, the term has since been widely adopted across disciplines such as agriculture, politics, economics, and education (Li, 2021). In sociology, for example, involution describes a culture that cannot or does not adapt or expand its economy, but continues to develop only in the direction of internal complexity and inefficiency (Hui, 2009), leading to “progressive complication, a variety within uniformity, virtuosity within monotony” (Goldenweiser, 1936; as cited in Geertz, 1963). This cross-disciplinary application denotes systems substituting complexity and developmental stagnation for meaningful progress.

1.2 The Chinese context

Similar to Geertz's work, involution was later extended to Chinese contexts by Huang (2000), who applied it to analyse historical peasant economies where large populations competed for limited resources. In contemporary Chinese education, involution manifests as excessive academic competition where students engage in additional learning activities—not because they are intrinsically motivated, but due to competitive pressures that ultimately yield minimal educational benefits while generating significant anxiety (Li, 2021). The term gained widespread social currency following its designation as one of China's top 10 buzzwords in 2020, with related hashtags accumulating over one billion views on Weibo (Wang and Wang, 2021). The Cultural Comment section of The New Yorker refers to involution as “the idea [that] had spread all corners of Chinese society”, “from college campuses to … China's hypercompetitive tech industry”. This new word “has entered the popular lexicon to describe feelings of burnout, ennui, and despair” (Liu, 2021). On local news, education has become “a source of tremendous stress for Chinese families”, which could be summed up in one word—“Involution” (Zhou, 2020). Thus, from Huang's economic analysis to modern education systems, involution appears as a structural paradox where participants’ overwork yields fewer returns but traps them in competition and exhaustion.

1.3 Causes behind involution

Given its pervasive presence in Chinese education and society, involution has sparked intense scrutiny within academia. However, despite the growing attention, systematic empirical research on involution remains limited. A number of articles have discussed this phenomenon, most of which analysed the causes of involution (Chen, 2024; Li, 2021; Liang, 2024; Liu, 2023; Meng, 2022; Qu, 2022; Wu, 2024; Zhao, 2023), primarily discussing these from two perspectives: the socio-macro perspective and the micro-family perspective (Chen, 2024). The socio-macro reasons include several structural factors: the educational system characterised by college entrance examination (“Gaokao”); scarcity and imbalance of education resources in China (Meng, 2022; Qu, 2022; Zhao, 2023); the vast population of the country and the increasing number of students due to enlarged enrolment in the higher education sector (Li, 2021; Liu, 2023; Meng, 2022); discrimination in vocational education (Chen, 2024; Li, 2021); and the intensely competitive environment highlighted by labour market competition, such as the devaluation of academic degrees (Chen, 2024; Liang, 2024; Zhao, 2023). The micro-family factors include Chinese parents’ higher expectations for children's academic success, partly due to the historical tradition that values education (Wu, 2024) and partly stemming from China's one-child policy between 1980 and 2016 (Chen, 2024; Liang, 2024); Chinese parents’ mindset around “seeking stability” (Liang, 2024); and differences in or lack of family capital (Liang, 2024; Zhao, 2023).

Similar competitive dynamics have been documented internationally: South Korean researchers have examined school competition and after-school tutoring (Park and Abelmann, 2004; Rudolf and Lee, 2023), Singaporean studies have investigated intense tutoring cultures (Tan, 2017), and Japanese scholarship has extensively analysed “examination hell” (Tsuneyoshi, 2004). These international perspectives offer valuable comparative context, though China's particular manifestation of involution carries its own distinct cultural and structural characteristics. China's unique socioeducational ecosystem, characterised by the central role of the national college entrance examination (Gaokao), deep-rooted Confucian values that tightly link educational achievement to family honour and social mobility, an increasingly credential-based and competitive labour market, and a rapidly evolving digital landscape dominated by platforms like WeChat and Douyin (TikTok), creates a unique, high-pressure context for educational involution. To understand the complex, multi-layered dynamics of this phenomenon and how the forces from each level interact with and reshape each other requires an in-depth contextual investigation. Therefore, an exploratory qualitative study within an exemplary and high-intensity context is more appropriate than a broad survey at this stage, as it allows for a more detailed examination of the ecological interactions.

Educational involution is not merely an academic concept: it reflects the complex interplay among families, schools, and society (Zhang et al., 2024). From the pressure of parental expectations to the fierce competition among students, its repercussions permeate every level of the education system (Zhang et al., 2024). While previous studies have contributed valuable insights into involution's causes, two critical limitations persist. The first of these is theoretical narrowness: Educational involution represents a multi-dimensional phenomenon requiring systematic understanding across multiple stakeholder perspectives rather than isolated causal analysis. The second is methodological gaps: Few studies have employed qualitative approaches to investigate stakeholder experiences, such as students’ voices, in depth, limiting our understanding of how involution manifests in daily educational practices. A recent scoping review synthesised 28 English-language peer-reviewed studies examining parental involvement within educational involution in China (Jia et al., 2026). Importantly, the review identified key empirical gaps: few qualitative studies capture multi-stakeholder lived experiences and perspectives, and limited work applies ecological systems lenses to analyse how parental involvement interacts with educational involution (Jia et al., 2026). Therefore, to address these gaps, this study employs a qualitative approach to investigate the perspectives and lived experiences of students, parents, and teachers across primary, secondary, and high school levels in China. The research question is: What are the perspectives and lived experiences of students, parents, and teachers regarding educational involution across different school levels in China? Specific research objectives include: Understanding educational involution in China is important for developing targeted interventions. By examining stakeholders’ experiences within Bronfenbrenner's ecological framework, this study aims to inform policies and practices that can mitigate involution's negative effects and better support students.

• To explore how educational involution is perceived and experienced by key stakeholders across primary, secondary, and high school levels.
• To examine the multi-level factors contributing to educational involution using Bronfenbrenner's ecological systems theory.
• To identify potential intervention points for addressing involution at various ecological levels.

1.4 Theoretical framework

Bronfenbrenner's ecological systems theory and its application have proven remarkably durable in educational research over the past few decades. Researchers have applied the framework to student achievement (Johnson, 2018), parental involvement (Hornby and Lafaele, 2011), and educational technology integration (Johnson and Puplampu, 2008). Neal and Neal (2013) redefined the bioecological model's conceptualisation, proposing an alternative “networked” model and applying it to child development. Hong and Espelage (2012) used the ecological framework to examine bullying, showing how individual, family, peer, school, and community factors interact to shape student outcomes. Vélez-Agosto et al. (2017) offered a critical review of the role of culture in the bioecological theory, proposing a revision to the model whereby culture becomes part of the central processes rather than a separate system operating from a macro level. These studies demonstrate the theory's versatility for analysing complex educational phenomena across multiple ecological levels.

As one of the most powerful descriptions of human development, Bronfenbrenner's ecological model sees children's lives and development as embedded in multi-layered, dynamic, and hierarchically nested contexts (Bronfenbrenner, 1979). In Bronfenbrenner's work, the development of an individual is defined as “a lasting change in the way in which a person perceives and deals with his environment” (Bronfenbrenner, 1979, p. 3). Given that educational involution relates to multiple layers of factors that are interconnected across society in China, this framework is chosen due to its holistic theoretical approach and unique capacity to capture the layered and interactive nature of educational involution in China. Unlike cultural-historical activity theory (Roth and Lee, 2007) which focuses on individual agency within social practices, or social reproduction theory which emphasises structural inequality, Bronfenbrenner's ecological theory, as discussed in the current study, offers a comprehensive lens to analyse how multiple systems simultaneously shape Chinese students’ experience of educational involution, including the microsystem (families, schools), mesosystem (home-school relationships), exosystem (social media), and macrosystem (Confucian culture, educational policies). Moreover, cultural-historical activity theory may overlook the broader societal pressure, such as the exam-oriented culture of China that permeates through these systems, while social reproduction theory's focus on class dynamics risks neglecting the agency of stakeholders in navigating these constraints.

Within Bronfenbrenner's ecological model, a microsystem refers to the immediate environments where the child directly participates and experiences face-to-face interactions (Bronfenbrenner, 1979). In this study, the microsystem includes the family environment, the classroom, and the peer group—the settings in which academic pressure, parental expectation, and competitive comparison are most directly and continuously experienced by the child.

A mesosystem comprises the interconnections between the child's microsystems (Bronfenbrenner, 1979). In this study, the mesosystem is most visible in home-school communication—the relationship between family and school through which information, expectations, and pressure circulate. Parent-teacher interactions, including what Epstein et al. (2002) describe as “communicating between home and school”, sit at this level, as do the ways in which families and schools mutually reinforce or exacerbate involutionary dynamics.

An exosystem refers to the settings that do not involve the child as an active participant, but in which events occur that affect, or are affected by, what happens in the setting containing that developing person (Bronfenbrenner, 1979). From the perspective of the student as the focal developing person, the exosystem in this study includes parents’ workplaces and social networks, school administration structures, and the digital media environment. Social media platforms, operating through recommendation algorithms, shape parental perceptions and anxieties about children's academic performance without the child's direct involvement.

The macrosystem refers to consistencies of lower-order systems (microsystem, mesosystem, and exosystem) that exist at the level of the subculture or the culture as a whole, along with any belief systems or ideology underlying such consistencies (Bronfenbrenner, 1979). In China's educational context, the macrosystem encompasses the Gaokao examination system, traditional Confucian values linking academic attainment to family honour and social mobility, competitive labour market conditions, and national educational policy. These macrosystemic forces establish the normative framework within which involution operates and lend it the character of inevitability that participants in this study consistently described.

The chronosystem incorporates the dimension of time into the ecological model, accounting for how developmental conditions and the broader contexts shaping them change across a person's life course and across historical periods (Bronfenbrenner, 1994). In this study, the chronosystem captures two related dynamics: the shift in sources of pressure that children experience as they move from primary through to secondary and high school, and the longer historical trajectory of educational policy in China, including the expansion of higher education since 1999 and the more recent introduction of the Double Reduction Policy. These temporal patterns shape how involution is experienced at each stage of schooling and how its conditions have evolved over time.

In this present study, educational involution is a complex issue with a multi-dimensional impact from each level of the ecological systems, rather than just the proximal contextual influence. Bronfenbrenner’s (1994) ecological model organises human development across five system levels, each nested within the next. The levels are not independent categories but mutually constitutive contexts: what happens at one level shapes, and is shaped by, conditions at the others. Understood in these terms, educational involution is not a microsystem problem of individual families or classrooms, nor a macrosystem problem of policy alone. It is an ecological phenomenon generated through the interaction of pressures across all five levels, which is precisely what makes Bronfenbrenner's framework well-suited to its analysis. Applying this framework to educational involution reveals how the phenomenon is not reducible to any single site of pressure but is produced through interactions that span from the child's immediate daily experience to the broad ideological and institutional conditions of Chinese society.

2 Method

2.1 Methodological positioning and study scope

Rather than seeking generalisable and transferable claims about Chinese educational involution across the country that may require a large-scale research project with a significant amount of data, our study is positioned as an exploratory case study of educational involution in Jiangsu Province, which is a purposively selected critical case with pronounced involution dynamics. For this design, we drew on Malterud et al.’s (2016) information power framework, which posits that sample size adequacy depends on the study's aim, sample specificity, theoretical framing, and analytical depth, rather than on arbitrary numerical thresholds. This is consistent with established guidance that exploratory qualitative case studies prioritising depth over breadth commonly yield sufficient thematic coverage with a smaller, purposeful sample (Yin, 2018), and that focused interview studies can reach saturation with 6–12 participants (Guest et al., 2006; Maxwell, 2013). Our sampling strategy of recruiting one participant per role per school level across three cities in the province was designed to capture positional contrast across key stakeholder groups, enabling exploration of how involution manifests across different ecological levels within this intense context. Moreover, for alignment with the exploratory case study design, this study adopts the crystallisation approach for qualitative rigour (Richardson, 2000; Richardson and St Pierre, 2005), which prioritises depth and multi-dimensional understanding over breadth. Epistemologically, while traditional qualitative methods seek a singular and objective reality in which saturation implies a definitive stopping point where gathering more data or themes yields no new conceptual insights, crystallisation argues that researchers are like crystals that reflect and refract different angles of the truth, hence the research is an ongoing and evolving interpretive process and never truly ends (Richardson, 2000; Richardson and St Pierre, 2005). Therefore, the traditional notion of saturation within crystallisation becomes a pragmatic decision when redundancy in codes is identified. In this study, the nine participants provided rich, varied accounts of their experience in educational involution, reaching a point where subsequent interviews yielded redundant elaboration of existing themes rather than new analytical categories drawing upon Bronfenbrenner’s (1979, 1994) ecological system levels.

2.2 Participants recruitment

The study was approved by the Griffith University Human Research Ethics Committee. Recruitment occurred through stratified and convenience sampling and snowball sampling via researcher networks. Nine participants, consisting of three sets of three, were drawn from across primary (Years 1–6), secondary (Years 7–9), and high school (Years 10–12) levels from Changzhou, Nanjing, and Taizhou within Jiangsu Province in China (see Table 1). As one of the leading provinces in education, Jiangsu hosts 168 higher education institutions, ranking itself first among all Chinese provinces. Jiangsu is often considered one of the most competitive provinces in education in China, particularly due to its high academic standards.

Table 1. Interview participants.

2.2.1 Inclusion criteria

Participants were purposively selected to capture variation across three stakeholder groups and three school levels in Jiangsu Province. Specific inclusion criteria were:

• Students: Enrolled in grades corresponding to public primary school (Years 1–6), secondary school (Years 7–9), or high school (Years 10–12) in Jiangsu, and able to provide assent and participate in a Mandarin-language interview.
• Parents: Primary caregiver of a child enrolled in a public K–12 school and able to provide informed consent and participate in a Mandarin-language interview.
• Teachers: Currently teaching at the relevant school level in the Jiangsu public school system with a minimum of 10 years of teaching experience and able to provide informed consent.

2.2.2 Recruitment procedures

We first stratified the sample by school level and stakeholder role to ensure coverage of all target levels. Initial participants were recruited through teacher contacts in the first author's professional networks. Other participants were referred by initial participants through snowball sampling.

2.2.3 Addressing potential sampling bias

We acknowledge that there might be potential network bias as reliance on the researcher network may overrepresent positive attitudes toward education or research participation. So, we used snowball sampling to reach participants outside of the author's immediate network to capture divergent experiences and varied perspectives.

2.3 Data collection

Before the formal data collection, a pilot study was conducted to ensure the clarity and cultural appropriateness of the wording of the interview guide questions. This pilot phase involved two semi-structured interviews with two individuals: one in-service secondary school teacher and one parent of a primary school student.

To protect participants’ anonymity, each participant was allocated a symbol, indicating their school level (P for primary, S for secondary, and H for high school) and their role (P for parent, T for teacher, and S for student). For example, the primary school teacher participant was given the symbol “PT”. Questions were reviewed through member checks. Nine interviews were conducted in Chinese and audio-recorded via Microsoft Teams. Interview duration ranged from 12 min to 52 min. They were translated by the lead author, who is a native speaker.

2.4 Data analysis

Interview data were analysed using thematic analysis, which is a “method for developing, analysing and interpreting patterns across a qualitative dataset, which involves systematic processes of data coding to develop themes” (Braun and Clarke, 2021, p. 4). Specifically, we employed an experiential reflexive thematic analysis where the “analysis aims to capture and explore people's own perspectives and understandings” to facilitate a rich and robust engagement with data (Braun and Clarke, 2021). The initial coding structure was thus organised deductively around Bronfenbrenner’s (1979) five ecological levels, providing the analytical scaffold; however, the subthemes within each level emerged inductively through close and repeated engagement with the interview data, allowing patterns particular to the Chinese educational context to surface rather than being imposed by the framework. The approach is therefore neither purely deductive nor purely inductive but theoretically informed throughout.

2.5 Credibility and trustworthiness

To ensure credibility and trustworthiness within our crystallisation framework, we followed a rigorous six-step process in reflexive thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke, 2021). The first step was familiarisation with the datasets. The first author transcribed and printed all nine interviews verbatim in Mandarin and engaged in repeated, active reading of the transcripts. During this phase, preliminary observational notes were made to capture initial recurring ideas, metaphors, and emotional tone. The second phase involved generating initial codes. Given that this study employs a theoretically informed and hybrid (Braun and Clarke, 2021) deductive thematic approach drawing upon Bronfenbrenner’s (1994) ecological theory, this is where the hybrid approach occurs. An initial deductive coding framework was established around the five ecological levels: microsystem, mesosystem, exosystem, macrosystem, and chronosystem. The first author manually tagged meaningful segments of text with colour-coded stickers. Each ecological level was assigned a distinct sticker colour, allowing for immediate visual mapping of where specific system levels appeared across participants’ accounts. This process supported deep immersion in the data and enabled the first author to detect subtle nuances that might be overlooked in purely digital coding. Concurrently, as reading progressed, inductively derived codes such as “algorithmic recommendation of social media” were added alongside the deductive framework. Phase 3 involved generating initial themes. Coded data extracts were collated based on their alignment with ecological levels. The physical stickers system proved particularly useful here as codes such as “algorithmic recommendation of social media”, “big data”, and “self-media” could easily be clustered into an inductively generated theme capturing the digital context. Throughout this phase, the research team held weekly meetings to review emergent themes. The next phase was reviewing themes; candidate themes and subthemes were rigorously checked. Some initial codes were refined, such as clustering “parents’ excessive focus on academic development” and “parents comparing with other children” into the subtheme “high pressure” under the major theme of “environment and atmosphere” at the microsystem. Phase 5 was defining and naming themes. Each theme was refined and reviewed by the research team to capture its relationship to educational involution, and subthemes under each theme were delineated to reflect nuanced meanings (see Table 2). Phase 6 was producing the report. The analysis is structured to align with Bronfenbrenner's ecological framework, with selected participants’ quotations integrated.

Table 2. Major themes and subthemes.

This hybrid approach enabled a rigorous yet flexible analysis that facilitates answering the research question of this study. Coding was conducted by the first author throughout, a decision consistent with reflexive thematic analysis, in which coding is treated as an interpretive act situated in the researcher's engagement with the data rather than a procedure requiring inter-coder agreement (Braun and Clarke, 2021). Consistency was pursued through structured team scrutiny rather than parallel coding. The research team met weekly, and the first author presented coded extracts, emerging codes, and candidate themes for discussion. The second and third authors questioned code allocation, particularly for extracts that could plausibly be assigned to more than one ecological level. Cases that generated disagreement were documented in research notes, revisited against the full transcript, and resolved through discussion until the team reached a shared reading. Theme definitions were revised iteratively in response to this scrutiny, and all authors reviewed the final coded dataset for coherence and alignment with the analytical framework.

2.6 Researcher reflexivity

We acknowledge our positioning as researchers embedded in Chinese educational contexts. The first author's experience as both a Chinese national and a parent provided an insider perspective that facilitated rapport-building and cultural understanding but may also have influenced interpretation toward familiar patterns. The research team discussed throughout the analysis process how our own experiences with Chinese education might shape our reading of participants’ accounts. We attempted to balance empathetic understanding with critical distance, particularly when participants’ perspectives aligned with dominant cultural narratives about educational success.

3 Findings

Before presenting the thematic findings, it is crucial to clarify the conceptual boundary that underpins this analysis. While the interview data reveals pervasive experiences of academic pressure, examination competition, and intensive parenting, this study frames these not as isolated phenomena or individual behaviour but as a structural condition. Educational involution is distinguished from general academic pressure in that it refers to a system-level trap within the educational ecosystem, while academic pressure is typically a response at the individual level (Xu et al., 2026).

Guided by Bronfenbrenner’s (1994) ecological systems theory, five major themes—namely, the environment and atmosphere (microsystem interactions), home-school communications (mesosystem dynamics), structural and digital influences (exosystem impact), social, political, economic, and cultural climate (macrosystem influences), and changes over time (chronosystem changes)—were generated from the interviews with the nine participants. Major themes and subthemes identified can be seen in Table 2. Findings are discussed below.

3.1 Microsystem interactions—environment and atmosphere

For the immediate family environment and atmosphere, subthemes including high pressure, parents’ marriage, and communication at home were generated, and these are discussed in turn.

3.1.1 High pressure

All the participants acknowledged that involution and high pressure exist around them and are ubiquitous, as they can see or hear or feel the involution at school, home, or work—in their own microsystems. According to one parent:

“As a parent to a school child, I hear the word (educational involution) a lot, like on the internet or in chat with colleagues. And I think it's the same among kids themselves.” (PP)

All teacher participants acknowledged that this issue of involution is quite serious. One teacher shared:

“It is a high-frequency word which not only appears at work but also on social media or when I am with friends.” (ST)

Participants also noted that the high competition evident among primary school students is largely from a competitive mentality among parents, who would frequently talk about and compare their children's academic performance with other parents during pick-up and drop-off, or with their friends in group chats and private chats. One student said:

“Parents would say something like ‘you are not doing as well as someone else’, which will lead students to come to class comparing themselves with their classmates.” (PS)

The primary school teacher participant expressed her perspective, similar to the concept of intensive parenting, which refers to a parenting practice when parents focus their attention on the upbringing of their children and give them full dedication by investing an enormous amount of energy and resources, even putting aside their own desires and interests in order to attend to their children's needs (Novoa et al., 2025). As the teacher commented:

“Some parents are overly concerned and invested in their children's academic development, and they will spare no effort to support their children in various tutoring services. Some parents pay too much attention to their children's test scores, thereby putting pressure on their children.” (PT)

Though all participants agreed on the existence of high pressure in students’ lives, all of the student participants appeared to find this acceptable. As one student shared:

“Having this kind of competitive streak could actually bring some improvement along the process, such as better scores, higher efficiency, and more independence. But the bad thing about this is at the cost of leisure time.”(PS)

In general, high pressure appeared as one of the strongest subthemes for stakeholders in educational involution.

3.1.2 Parents’ marriage

All teacher participants also mentioned the importance of parents’ marriage in educational involution, as it is an essential component of children's microsystem. Some participants reported that top students who demonstrate both academic excellence and high confidence usually share some common characteristics of family environment, including their parents having a good marital relationship and being able to support the child with more psychological strength. One teacher commented:

“Behind those children (top students who not only show outstanding academic performance but also overall confidence at school), there are families that share some similarities. Those parents mostly display patience and care about their children's interests and hobbies, and they have a good marital relationship. You would enjoy communicating with such parents and family.” (ST)

However, parents’ broken marriage sometimes could be “the last straw that broke the camel's back” in educational involution. Participants also shared the problems arising from broken families; for instance, if children are showing good intelligence but a bad temper, or appear withdrawn at school, the teachers comment that it could be “the family and parents that went wrong”. One teacher shared:

“For those children, some are brought up in a single-parent family, some grow up with a controlling or domineering parent.” (ST)

Another teacher shared a tragic example with a similar perspective:

“…it started with this child (Year 11) asking his mother to buy him a cell phone. His mother, recently divorced, refused the child's request firmly, even after the child threatened to harm himself.”(HT)

For all the teacher participants, parents’ marriage appeared to be an important factor in the family environment regarding educational involution.

3.1.3 Communications at home

All teacher participants noted the importance of communication at home, yet acknowledged there are failures or a lack of communication between students and parents due to disadvantaged socioeconomic status. As one teacher shared:

“Many parents just don't know how to communicate with their children, let alone be involved. This is something to do with the parents’ social levels, especially their education level.”(HT)

To all the teacher participants, day-to-day conversations at home appeared to be another essential form of parental involvement in the microsystem.

3.2 Mesosystem dynamics—home-school communications, the two-way efforts

In the educational involution, home-school communication is an important manifestation of the mesosystem. Subthemes regarding mesosystem dynamics include appropriate parental involvement, absent parents and missing links, imbalance of power, and two-way efforts, which will be further discussed below.:

3.2.1 Multi-setting participation: appropriate parental involvement

Multi-setting participation is the most basic form of interconnection between settings (Bronfenbrenner, 1979). In this study, several participants expressed their perspectives on the need for an “appropriate extent of parental involvement”. One parent shared:

“I think it is necessary for parents to supervise their children appropriately, and you can't just let children do whatever they want.”(SP)

One teacher commented:

“But it must be an appropriate degree of parental involvement. If you involve too much, it will cause pressure on children.” (PT)

The interconnection between different settings primarily begins with multi-setting interactions. Multiple participants shared views on “appropriate extent of parental involvement”, recognising both the essential role of parental involvement and the possible negative effect if such involvement becomes overly intensive.

3.2.2 Indirect linkage: the absent parents and the missing links

An indirect linkage could be established when the microsystems do not interact directly with each other but through a third party, a mediator, or a factor from the exosystem or beyond. Several teacher participants expressed concerns over the absence of parents due to work. Some parents, such as rural migrant workers, do not even live in the same city or area as their children. One teacher said:

“There are parents who have been out of contact with school.” (ST)

Parents from lower socioeconomic backgrounds were reported to be more likely to be absent in education or home-school communication due to exosystem reasons such as work, which might lead teachers to think that they do not attach importance to education.

“When both parents of left-behind children work in Shanghai, and the child lives in school dormitories, there is basically no parental involvement, no contact with school whatsoever.”

The teacher participant then added,

“What kind of involvement could exist in that case?”(HT)

The absence of parents could be perceived as the missing links in the mesosystem, especially for lower socioeconomic background families.

3.2.3 Inter-setting communications: imbalance of power

Inter-setting communications may be one-sided or may occur in both directions in various forms (Bronfenbrenner, 1979). For Chinese students, inter-setting communications can be represented by a variety of home-school communication forms: direct interactions such as face-to-face interactions including home-visits, parent-teacher interviews, or meetings; telephone conversations between parent and school; online home-school communication via platforms such as Ding Talk which allows features including school announcements, text or voice messages, phone calls, video calls, files, or group chat; or indirectly via leaving notes on students’ homework or home-school contact brochures. Given that home-school communication in China is largely school- and teacher-led, a dynamic that centres educator authority, its role in educational involution is complex and multi-dimensional. It can serve as a positive channel for guidance and support, yet under the same asymmetric structure, it may also intensify competition by reinforcing performance pressure and normative expectations.

As some teacher participants noted in the interviews, some parents are not active or even involved in home-school communication due to various reasons based on their personal understandings of their role as parents. Some may hold the belief that it is not the parents’ responsibility, or they are simply too busy to get involved, or they do not possess the ability to get involved. One teacher shared:

“Some parents think they are incapable of doing so, and some may think it is just the teacher's job.” (ST)

One possible explanation for the lower parental efficacy of Chinese parents could be the impact of traditional Confucian culture, which is a factor from the macrosystem level. The tradition of overly emphasising respect for teachers could cause an imbalance of power between teachers and parents.

3.2.4 Inter-setting knowledge: higher expectations, anxiety sources, two-way efforts

Inter-setting knowledge is information or experience that exists in one setting about the other, which could be obtained through inter-setting communications or external settings. In children's education, inter-setting knowledge can be manifested by parents gaining information about other students by communicating with other parents, or teachers learning more about students’ strengths through communication with parents. One parent stated:

“We would often exchange information regarding our children's development with colleagues and friends, such as the results of the latest exams. I think this is just a form of educational involution.” (PP)

However, although rare in Chinese culture, the other manifestation of sharing inter-setting knowledge—teachers learning more about students’ skills and qualities outside of school, through talking to parents—could be beneficial for positive home-school communications. As one teacher shared:

“It is always a pleasant communication experience with top students’ parents. They would not only respect and listen but also share with us the child's life outside of school in a modest and educated way. You can feel their love and trust in their child/ren. I find this impressive.”(ST)

As revealed earlier regarding microsystem interactions, parents learning about other children's development could add more pressure to Chinese parents’ higher expectations, leading to anxiety for both parents and children; while teachers learning more about students’ “other side” may be helpful for building a stronger home-school partnership.

3.3 Exosystem impact—structural and digital impact

An exosystem has been defined as consisting of one or more settings that do not involve the developing person directly but in which events occur that affect, or are affected by, what happens in that setting (Bronfenbrenner, 1979). In this study, two subthemes are generated at the exosystem level: school administration style and social media.

3.3.1 School administration

The school administration, or in some cases just the role of the principal, is important in students’ exosystem from Bronfenbrenner’s (1979) ecological system perspective. The principal, as the core of the administration, determines the school vision, school values, the ways that the school carries out educational policies, and the allocation of resources, although the lived experience of school discipline and rigid timetables generated by these administrative decisions falls within students’ microsystem. One teacher commented:

“There are two types of school management, student-oriented and stability-oriented. The first kind emphasises the development of students, while the second kind, which sadly is mostly what we have, stresses a lot on discipline, order, and safety. I think this has a lot to do with the school leaders’ type. Sometimes, a revolutionary changemaker could bring vitality to the education reality.”(ST)

Other than parents’ and peers’ influence, the personality and passion of teachers would eventually impact the students as well. One parent shared:

“I think, unlike in primary school or even kindergarten, schoolteachers would play an increasingly important role above secondary school level, even for high school and after college. Because in the process of education, the teacher's personal influence or personality could be very important to a child.” (SP)

How school principals lead the school culture may significantly impact students’ microsystems, as when the educational philosophies of principals and teachers align, it can reignite teachers’ passion amidst the mundane pressures of educational involution.

3.3.2 Social media

Nowadays, social media, including self-media, plays an increasingly important role in people's social lives and now functions as a digital exosystem for students that shapes the norms, perceptions, and ideals of parents and teachers without the child's direct involvement. Self-media refers to independently operated accounts run by individual users posting self-produced content on social media platforms (Bowman and Willis, 2003), such as WeChat or TikTok. The emergence of self-media enables almost every citizen in the country to express their opinions in their unique way and even make doing so a business. For instance, WeChat is more than just a social-networking tool that allows messaging, social media, or mobile payment features, becoming a lifestyle for over 1.38 billion users across China to use it on a daily basis. For Chinese parents, self-media on WeChat or TikTok is an important source of information, which under the current “recommendation algorithm” would recommend content based on the user's interaction history, such as what type of content they've liked, shared, or followed. One teacher commented:

“The impact of self-media and big data (recommendation algorithm) on people cannot be ignored. Sometimes the parents just cannot control themselves when they've kept scrolling or receiving feeds on their phone regarding educational involution.” (ST)

Constant exposure to curated content about other children's achievements fuels social comparison, also leading to more anxiety in parents. One parent expressed their concern thus:

“As I said, with social media, you just can't help but compare your child with others constantly, which ultimately intensifies parents’ anxiety.” (HP)

However, the role of self-media within the exosystem is complex and multifaceted. Beyond creating a feedback loop that amplifies parental anxiety, self-media also serves as a significant ecological setting for informational needs, where parents, even teachers, can learn useful education-related information. As one teacher participant shared:

“We sometimes see that kind of principal with educational ideals … they keep appearing in my self-media feed. I may not necessarily evaluate the authenticity of it, but honestly (as teachers) we do hope for that kind of school leader who has a true passion for the cause of education.” (ST)

Social media, including self-media, is not merely a vector for anxiety but a complex ecological component that shapes the norms, perceptions, and ideals of parents and teachers.

3.4 Macrosystem influences—confucian culture, the “gaokao baton”, and labour market competition

In children's education, the macrosystem includes cultural values, policies, social ideologies, historical traditions, and economic environment, which overall provide a normative framework for systems at other levels. Some participants shared their perspective on traditional Chinese culture's impact, citing examples from neighbouring Asian countries that also manifest hyper-competitive education. One parent shared:

“The East Asian education mode that we have and share … is something we inherit from history and culture.” (HP)

All interview participants in this study expressed their concerns that as long as the “Gaokao baton” and enrolment pressure exist, the involution would last. One parent said:

“There isn't too much change, you know, because the ultimate baton (Gaokao) still exists.” (SP)

Several participants shared the same perspective—that for a student who wants to secure a decent job and have a promising future, it is essential to earn an advanced academic degree and that, in this sense, the educational involution is “inevitable”. Some student participants also spoke about this “invisible baton” and the fierce competition beyond college:

“I think involution is not something caused by individuals, because one has to enter college through fierce competition, and even beyond that, if you want to secure a good job. It is inevitable.” (PS)

For all participants, China's exam-centric educational system, enrolment pressure, deep-rooted cultural beliefs, and competitive labour market all contributed to the educational involution.

3.5 The chronosystem—the perceived changing courses

The chronosystem integrates the temporal dimension, encompassing both individual developmental trajectories and broader socio-historical shifts shaping educational contexts. Given this study's cross-sectional design, we cannot track individual developmental trajectories, instead, this section draws on participants across different school stages to interpret temporal dimensions of educational involution. In this study, a major subtheme was constructed in the chronosystem: the perceived differences in dominant sources of pressure. Primary school level participants largely highlighted pressure stemming from parents’ “competitive streak”.

“Some parents do not consider the actual situation of their children, they just enrol their kids in all kinds of tutoring classes or cram their kids with loads of exercises.” (PT)

However, when children get to the secondary or high school level, things change. The source of pressure seems to shift from home to school, as parents are stepping back from their children's education while students spend over 10 h or even longer at school under a “refined management timetable” on a daily basis.

“Frankly, the pressure is quite high … (the pressure) mostly comes from what we call “the refined timetable” which specifies your hours of a day at school (7:15–18:00); (it) also comes from the repetitiveness of our schedule, which I believe not only brought the anxiety but also fatigue and a loss of passion; thirdly it comes from a dilemma of short-term education reality and long-term education ideal.” (ST)

The sources of stress for Chinese students change over time: in primary school, it mainly comes from parental competition, while in secondary school and above, it turns to strict school management.

4 Discussion

There is currently a scarcity of literature on stakeholders’ perspectives regarding educational involution. This exploratory case study in Jiangsu Province contributes to understanding how involution operates as an ecologically produced phenomenon rather than an individual-level problem. It is important to situate this discussion within the study's design, with Jiangsu selected as a critical case. As such, our discussion below documents how educational involution manifests for these nine participants within the Jiangsu Province context. As summarised in Figure 1, engaging with Bronfenbrenner’s (1979) ecological model of human development—a systematic understanding of human development, which sees children's lives and development as embedded in multidimensional and hierarchically nested contexts—provides a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the research findings.

4.1 Supportive environment at home and school

The high pressure of the child's immediate environment acts through the most basic dyadic interactions and the roles of authority, including the roles of parent and teacher. Beginning at the innermost level of the ecological system, one of the basic units of analysis in the microsystem is the concept of dyad, which is formed whenever two persons pay attention to or participate in each other's activities (Bronfenbrenner, 1979). As a dyadic unit of child and parent, or of student and teacher, how the parent or teacher perceives the educational involution affects the developing child, which validates Bronfenbrenner's statement: “If one member of a dyad undergoes developmental change, the other is also likely to do so” (Bronfenbrenner, 1979, p.65).

The value of “guan”, a typical Chinese parenting belief and a unique Chinese parenting style feature which involves training and supervision, discipline and governance, monitoring and even control (Chao, 1994), highlights the role of parents in Chinese traditional culture (Huang and Prochner, 2003). Chinese parents believe that when children reach school age, they should be expected to “understand things” and thus should be hard-working and self-disciplined (Huang and Prochner, 2003; Xie, 1996). Across interviews with all three participants of the primary school set, a clear alignment can be seen that at this level, learning in involution has been perceived as “completing a task”, which has been mostly forced by their parents.

Similar to Baumrind’s (1978) authoritarian parenting style concept, characterised by high demands and low responsiveness, the emphasis on obedience and a set standard of conduct demonstrates high pressure from parents and the imbalance of power between parents and the child, which fails to meet the dyadic properties that are conducive to development proposed by Bronfenbrenner (1979).

In the context of school, the student and the teacher also form a dyad. At the secondary and high school level, pressure on students, which appears to come directly from the teacher, filters down from the exosystem—the school administration or even the macrosystem, such as the Gaokao. Meanwhile, the role of teachers becomes increasingly important in educational involution above the primary school level as students spend more hours at school, thus teachers’ personality might exert more influence on secondary school and high school students. This dyad is central to our analysis because, according to Bronfenbrenner’s (1979) framework, a functional proximal process requires the mutuality of positive feelings as one of the three dyadic properties conducive to development. Therefore, examining the quality of the teacher-student relationship is key to understanding the microsystemic dynamics of involution.

Secondly, from the ecological system perspective, parents’ marriage plays an important role in educational involution as it is an essential component of children's microsystem. The examples shared by teacher participants demonstrated such importance. As one tragedy shared by a high school teacher, the way that parents’ marriage impacts the student's education is similar to “the spillover hypothesis”, which suggests that positive and negative emotions elicited in a marital relationship can be spread to parent-child interaction (Lui et al., 2020). In terms of Bronfenbrenner’s (1979) ecological theory, it could be analysed by N + 2 dyadic development that extended from the concept of the dyad. A third party can enhance or impair the capacity of a dyad to perform its developmental functions. A father, in this case, can serve as a source of security but could also undermine the quality of a primary dyadic relationship, such as a mother-son relationship, if the marriage faces challenges.

Thirdly, communication at home is vital. A joint activity dyad is a form of dyad where two participants perceive themselves as doing something together. For a child at home, a joint dyad of child and parent exhibits the following characteristics: reciprocity, balance of power, and affective relation (Bronfenbrenner, 1979). The reciprocity of communications between parent and child not only helps foster interactive skills but also improves the sense of interdependence, security, and affective relationship, which is consistent with Guo and colleagues’ empirical study (Guo et al., 2018) that revealed the importance of day-to-day conversation at home.

Microsystems constitute children's daily environment and have the most direct impact on children's development through frequent interactions and emotional support. The dyadic interactions between parent and child, and between teacher and student, are essential for creating a supportive environment; developmental transitions, such as a broken marriage, may lead to a potential negative impact on the development of children in educational involution.

4.2 Home-school partnership and two-way efforts

The core of the mesosystem lies in the impact of the interactions between different microsystems. From the findings of this study, home-school partnerships and two-way efforts are essential in guaranteeing the mesosystem dynamics in educational involution.

4.2.1 Appropriate parental involvement

In educational involution, the scope and extent of parental involvement is an important form of multi-setting participation. Either excessive involvement or a lack of parental involvement would harm students’ development in different ways. Too much parental involvement, often termed “parental overinvolvement”, is found to be linked to negative educational outcomes. According to a recent study which used nationally representative data, intense parental involvement is associated with higher levels of children's internalising problems such as anxiety (Li et al., 2023), as such a high level of parental involvement would cause pressure in students’ microsystem, diminishing the dyadic development. Conversely, the absence of parents in children's education, which may be caused by the exosystem, which in turn is caused by the macrosystem, could potentially form an indirect linkage between home and school, which forms the missing link of children's mesosystem. This indirect linkage could bring systemic risks as it may amplify the incoordination between microsystems, such as inconsistencies or even conflict between home and school goals.

4.2.2 Two-way efforts

The roles of teachers have a significant cultural connotation in China. The Chinese traditional educational philosophy “respect teachers and value education” (尊师重教) has seen teachers not only as knowledge providers but also as role models, thus seeing teaching as a sacred profession. Teachers hold a position of high authority and high esteem as a central figure of the classroom, and students from a young age are taught and expected to be obedient and respectful to their teacher. In the meantime, the roles of Chinese parents are responsible for their children's moral development and basic education, while teachers are expected to be more deeply involved in education. The three character classic (《三字经》) clearly states the educational responsibilities of teachers and parents: to feed without teaching is the father's fault; to teach without severity is the teacher's laziness (“子不教父之过，教不严师之惰”). Parents acknowledge the teacher's contribution and are normally supportive of the teacher's authoritative role in their children's education, just as the old saying goes, “One day as a teacher, forever as a father” (“一日为师终身为父”). The overemphasis of the role of teachers could lead to an imbalance of power between parent and teacher, which further leads to lower parental efficacy, especially for disadvantaged families in a vulnerable position in terms of home-school communication.

Traditional home-school communication in China is mostly carried out in one way: teachers share information about students with parents. In most cases, teachers would point out the problems in students’ school performance and let parents know so that parents could pay more attention to it and provide support at home. As noted in the previous section, this form of home-school communication may largely be caused by the imbalance of power between teacher and parent in Chinese children's education. However, our findings show that teachers welcome when parents break the imbalance and share “the other side” of students, for instance, their personality, interests, and personal experiences. As parents share with the teacher about the child's strengths or qualities outside of school, mutual trust and positive orientation are enhanced; as the teacher learns more about the child, it would help achieve goal consensus between home and school.

At this level of mesosystems, the reinforcing effect of linkage between microsystems could form resonance in the interactions either way. It may further compress individual space if home-school communication undergoes challenges; however, effective home-school communication in partnership could provide an advantageous environment. The two-way efforts between home and school are important in creating an effective mesosystem for students. The key to the future lies in establishing a partnership of home and school to build an educational community based on trust via an effective and systematic communication mechanism.

4.2.3 Postulated mechanism

Building from participants’ accounts, we postulate a potential underlying mechanism through which mesosystem indirect linkage may transmit systemic inequalities and involutionary pressures. Our analysis reveals that indirect linkages frequently serve as a critical mechanism for transmitting systemic inequalities and involutionary pressures. The case of disengaged rural migrant-worker parents is not merely a matter of individual choice but a chain of ecological absence. Exosystem-level factors such as rural-urban labour migration and household registration policies create a structural separation of families in terms of microsystem availability. And teachers, guided by the macrosystem-level cultural belief of the ideal involved parent, tend to interpret this structural absence as parents’ lack of attention to children's education. The missing links could lead to reallocation of educational attention and resources toward more engaged families and children from SES-disadvantaged families risk being further marginalised. Consequently, the structural inequalities may lead to implicit disparities in educational opportunities within children's microsystem, while pressure intensifies among the “visible” families. It demonstrates how involution functions not just as pervasive academic stress but as a self-perpetuating system of further exclusion and amplification.

4.3 Information or information cocoons, that is a question

Whilst Bronfenbrenner (1979) did discuss mass media in his framework, the increasing presence of contemporary digital technologies represents qualitatively different interactions that arguably need updated theoretical consideration. Recognising that the preliminary formulation predated the digital revolution, Johnson and Puplampu (2008) extended Bronfenbrenner's theory to include a “techno-subsystem”, situating the developing child in a microsystem which includes interactions not only with human communicators but also with nonhuman elements of information, communication, and digital technologies. Building on their work, researchers further proposed the techno-microsystem, providing more concrete descriptions of the mechanisms of such influence (Johnson, 2010) and, more recently, Navarro and Tudge (2023) examined how digital environments function within ecological systems and proposed an overarching theoretical framework of an adaptation of Bronfenbrenner's bioecological theory, providing useful precedent for thinking about social media platforms within the exosystem context.

Crucially, however, these existing extensions do not fully capture the specific structural role that algorithm-driven platforms play in educational involution. Earlier formulations position digital environments as settings that a person enters and leaves, whether the developing child (Johnson, 2010; Johnson and Puplampu, 2008) or, more broadly, participants in the ecological system (Navarro and Tudge, 2023). Recommendation-based platforms operate differently. Content is selected, sequenced, and repeated according to a user's prior engagement, so the setting alters its composition with each interaction. A parent who attends to material about children's academic standing will be supplied with more of it, since the platform registers that attention as preference. Amplification therefore occurs through the structure of the setting itself, which helps explain why the parents in this study described anxiety that intensified rather than settled over time. Johnson and colleagues (2008) defined the techno-microsystem as digital environments in which the child directly participates, emphasising proximal processes and direct interactions. In contrast, our proposed “digital exosystem” describes digitally mediated environments in which the child does not directly participate but which nonetheless shape developmental outcomes through impact on caregivers. While Navarro and Tudge (2023) argue for a general integration of digital technologies into Bronfenbrenner's theory, their account does not specify how recommendation-based platforms function as structuring contexts for parental behaviour. Our proposed digital exosystem concept contributes by theorising how social media platforms expand the traditional exosystem and transform it into an ongoing, anxiety-generating force that amplifies the macrosystemic pressures into micro-level parental behaviours.

For children in the digital age, exosystemic forces play a more significant role in their lives than in previous generations (Navarro and Tudge, 2023). Their parents are not only in the physical exosystem such as the workplace, where they discuss and compare with colleagues about children's school performance, but also in what we call the digital exosystem, which is similar to researchers’ propositions of the “techno-subsystem”, the “techno-microsystem”, or the “virtual microsystem” (Johnson, 2010; Johnson and Puplampu, 2008; Navarro and Tudge, 2023). The digital exosystem includes critical components such as social media and self-media in contemporary education in China.

Although some research found that the use of social media, especially self-media such as TikTok, fulfils parents’ information needs for promoting healthy parenting styles to more people (Anisa et al., 2023), there are also preliminary results indicating that greater social anxiety is associated with the use of social media (Chamsi and Adil, 2023). The concept of “information cocoons” was first proposed by American scholar Keith Sunstein; he argued that in the context of information communication, users tend to focus on topics that align with their interests, inadvertently forming a “personal newspaper” that enables them to exclude or ignore other content (Sunstein, 2006). Subsequent research has further explored the manifestation of this theory in the digital age; for instance, the application of self-media, including short-video features, may lead to an information cocoon (Wang and Zhang, 2022). Complementing this line of investigation, other researchers have found that users with narrow preferences are more likely to be trapped (Li et al., 2022). In our findings, the recommendation algorithm of self-media, seeing other children's performance shared by their parents, and the overload of information sometimes amplify parents’ educational anxiety. For Chinese parents who are already well known for higher educational expectations, the daily use of self-media, which forms the digital exosystem, could spread and further amplify their anxiety, ultimately leading to more educational involution.

This phenomenon of self-media is not an isolated digital trend that operates independently but is interlocked with other layers within Bronfenbrenner’s (1979) ecological system. Under the long-term pressures from the macrosystem, such as the cultural tradition and the current exam-oriented education system, parents’ behaviour of seeking informational advantages through self-media stems from deep-seated anxiety over limited structural resources and future uncertainties. The algorithm precisely corresponds to this anxiety, expanding it beyond previously confined competition in the physical world to a non-stop, extreme competition.

4.4 Navigating the past, the present, and the future

Historically, Chinese children's academic achievement has been linked with family honour, social success and, ultimately, realising social class mobility of a family, which is why parents view children's academic success as family honour rather than for the sake of children's own development.

Confucian culture has exerted considerable influence on the microsystem in the following aspects. Firstly, it has an impact on educational goals. As the old Confucian educational saying goes: He who excels in study can follow an official career. Education is mainly considered a primary means of selecting government talents for the country and social mobility opportunities for individuals (Chen, 2024; Huang and Gove, 2015), which is highly consistent with the function of the college entrance examination. The emphasis on respecting teachers and obedience strengthens the educator's authority while undermining students’ initiative (Chien et al., 2024), and even parents’ self-efficacy. This dynamic manifests in several ways, such as classroom instruction that prioritises lecturing over discussion, which hinders students’ critical thinking, students become reluctant to question authority, and parents feel less confident initiating home-school communications. It is consistent with our findings that students seem to accept “a certain amount of pressure”, some even finding it beneficial as it brings higher scores. Confucianism also pays more attention to family and collective interests over individual interests, such as viewing children's achievement as parents’ pride, or elevating a family's honour above children's own interests (Chen, 2024). Ancient sayings such as “guang zong yao zu” or “guang yao men mei”, meaning bring glory and honour to your family and ancestors, represent Chinese parents’ higher expectations of their children and their ultimate educational goal, which could lead to parents ignoring children's own interests and potential, forcing them in one direction.

Secondly, Confucian culture impacts families’ education philosophy and parenting styles. Just as the school shapes students’ behavioural norms such as modesty and obedience through the moral education curriculum, Chinese family education philosophy tends to raise children to show filial piety and obedience, whereas disobeying parents is considered a serious disrespect. Under this philosophy, it would be difficult for a child to develop their own interests if it were a “Tiger Mum” or “Wolf Dad” situation. Thirdly, the favouritism towards top students may lead to stigmatisation of those with lower academic performance, which potentially could cause more students’ mental health problems (Xie and Liu, 2026).

At present, the Gaokao baton and enrollment pressure are the institutional manifestations of the macrosystem. It embodies the value of “fair competition”, as it provides a core mechanism for class mobility, especially for economically disadvantaged students from rural areas, reflecting the “equal opportunity” orientation of the macrosystem; whereas its design also reflects the selection logic for standard talents, the utilitarianizing of education under the pressure of Gaokao has also exacerbated educational involution, as the entire system becomes geared towards maximizing scores and rankings, often at the expense of holistic development (Cheng and Hamid, 2025).

Moreover, the impact of the Gaokao baton and enrolment pressure on the microsystem is noticeable from the following aspects: Firstly, the Gaokao has led to schools being dominated by exam-oriented education, demonstrated in school policy in terms of what participants shared in interviews—"refined management timetable”. This is part of a broader phenomenon where teaching content is exclusively focused on exam-taking skills, curriculum is modified to emphasise Gaokao subjects, and subjects such as music and art are marginalised as “redundant” (Cheng and Hamid, 2025). Teachers, under significant pressure for their students’ performance, become “teaching machines”, emphasising repetitive homework and tests over broader pedagogical goals (Cheng and Hamid, 2025). Secondly, it has led to parents investing heavily in their children's education, aiming for high scores in entrance exams regardless of their children's own interests and potential. Inscribed in Confucian traditions but intensified by neoliberal competition and middle-class anxiety, parental involvement ranges from purchasing properties in top school districts to mothers quitting jobs to provide full-time support during Gaokao preparation (Cheng and Hamid, 2025). Thirdly, it has caused students’ learning motivation to be dominated by external evaluation such as scores and rankings, thus inhibiting the development of their intrinsic interests (Liu and Helwig, 2022). The contradiction between the traditional understanding of Gaokao as “one single exam determines your whole life” and a more diversified evaluation system that has been called for reflects the game between new and old values in the macrosystem.

Enrolment in Chinese higher education has expanded enormously since China joined the World Trade Organisation in 2001, which was seen as a “second opening” for the country, following the launch of landmark reform policies in 1978 (Ding et al., 2009). As competition in the labour market intensifies and as higher education has undergone unprecedented expansion in China since 1999, more people are pursuing advanced academic degrees to stay competitive in the labour market, which has led to the issue of devaluation of academic degrees, also known as credential inflation (Zeng, 2023). According to statistics revealed by (China Education Online, 2024), graduate student enrollment in China has been expanding in recent years, with 872, 200 total graduate admission plan for 2025, an increase of 13,000 over the previous year. The devaluation of academic degrees is one of the causes behind educational involution.

The macrosystem is the “invisible hand” of the educational ecological system where students navigate tensions from the past, present, and future in the interactions between educational policies and traditional culture, between educational globalisation and localisation. College entrance examination policies (Gaokao), traditional Confucian culture, and the competitive labour market are all salient contributory factors linked to involution and could be resources to solve the problem as well, if examined from the ecological perspective. At the policy level, the Double Reduction Policy attempts to ease the pressure and involution by restricting extracurricular training; however, it is hindered by the concept of “credential society” in the macrosystem. These macrosystemic forces, including Gaokao pressure, Confucian cultural values, and labour market competition to involution are national and are likely across China's urban and high-competition regions. However, the intensity of these dynamics and how they interact with local mesosystem and microsystem practices may vary across regions due to different resource allocations and policy implementation contexts. In this regard, education reform needs to go beyond single system adjustment and must respond to the cultural inertia and structural contradictions of the macrosystem. Countermeasures could include focusing on balance standardisation and personalisation, such as the enhancement of vocational education in conjunction with college entrance examination reform.

4.5 Timing, systemic shifts, and contradiction

The chronosystem reveals how temporal dynamics shape both the broader educational landscape and individual developmental trajectories. A key finding is the shift in the primary source of pressure: as students progress to secondary school and beyond, thus spending more time at school, the locus of pressure moves from the family microsystem (e.g., parental competition) to the school exosystem (e.g., rigid timetables). This shift underscores the changing supporting role of the family, particularly during critical transitions like puberty. Simultaneously, macrosystem policies such as historical college enrollment expansion or the recent Double Reduction Policy marked a shift from “examination-oriented” to “quality-oriented” education propagated through the exosystem to affect developmental pathways across generations. These intersecting temporal pressures—developmental, institutional, and historical—demonstrate the cumulative bioecological effects of the chronosystem.

The chronosystem also helps interpret contradictions in the data. Aligned with prior research that reveals contradictory perspectives (Liu and Helwig, 2022), a particularly striking tension emerges in a primary student's account, which contradicts the study's foundational premise that involution generates “diminishing returns while increasing student and family stress.” The primary student stated: “Having this kind of competitive streak could actually bring some improvement along the process, such as better scores, higher efficiency, and more independence. But the bad thing about this is at the cost of leisure time.” While acknowledging costs, this positive framing of competitive pressure's benefits appears in stark contrast to other participants’ descriptions of anxiety, excessive workload, and diminishing well-being.

This contradiction requires careful interpretation; several analytical possibilities emerge. First, this reflects the normalisation of pressure within Chinese educational culture, where students learn to reframe competitive demands as developmental opportunities, a coping mechanism that protects psychological well-being while perpetuating the system. The primary student's use of measurable outcomes (“better scores, higher efficiency”) demonstrates internalisation of productivity-focused values that define involution itself. Second, developmental stage shapes perception: primary students experience manageable challenge rather than overwhelming pressure, with involution's negative effects accumulating as students advance through secondary and high school levels, aligning with the chronosystem finding discussed above. Third, individual variation matters profoundly: This student's resilient perspective reflects particular family dynamics, academic aptitude, or personality traits that buffer against pressure's negative effects.

5 Conclusion and implications

This study contributes to educational research by demonstrating how Bronfenbrenner’s (1979, 1994) ecological systems theory can analyse complex phenomena like involution that operate simultaneously across multiple system levels. Unlike studies focusing on single levels (e.g., parenting practices at the microsystem or policy at the macrosystem levels), our analysis reveals how involution emerges through ecological interactions. The primary student's positive pressure framing, teachers recognising harm while perpetuating systems, and parents feeling compelled to compete despite recognising costs all illustrate stakeholders trapped in ecological double-binds wherein individual-level solutions prove insufficient. This exploratory study documents how involution manifests in Jiangsu Province for these nine participants and cannot be taken as nationally representative. The crystallisation approach (Richardson, 2000) provides depth through positional contrast across stakeholder groups. Our ecological framework extends existing literature on home-school communication challenges (Guo et al., 2018) and examination pressure in East Asian contexts (Park and Abelmann, 2004; Tan, 2017) by revealing how known challenges operate as ecologically produced patterns requiring coordinated intervention across system levels simultaneously.

As Bronfenbrenner pointed out, “the overwhelming bulk of research on human development is limited to the microsystem level” (Bronfenbrenner, 1979, p. 21). By investigating the perspectives of students, parents, and teachers on educational involution in China, this research extends how Bronfenbrenner's ecology theory applies in contemporary educational involution at microsystem, mesosystem, exosystem, macrosystem, and chronosystem levels, respectively, where students navigate increasingly complex academic and social pressures.

The educational involution inherently arises from dysfunctional interactions across all levels within ecological systems, such as excessive competition among individuals in microsystems; the missing linkage of the mesosystems; the structural pressure at the exosystem level; and traditional culture and values from the macrosystem. As Bronfenbrenner pointed out: “A key to the enhanced effectiveness of public education lies not within the school itself but in its interconnections with other settings in the society” (Bronfenbrenner, 1979, p. 214). To solve the involution, we need to establish and improve the overall ecological system by enhancing the dynamics at each level, rather than just relying on local adjustments. For the microsystem, it is important for contemporary parents to develop a growth mindset and tailored home-based parental involvement skills such as communication with their children and respecting children's voices; within the mesosystem, home-school communications could and should play a more active role in supporting students’ development, which requires a more efficient home-school communication mechanism; for the exosystem nowadays, it is not confined to a physical world, but the digital environment too, which needs more regulation of self-media that spread anxiety; at the macrosystem level, the government has implemented the “Double Reduction” Policy in July 2021 which aimed to alleviate the academic burden and ease the educational anxiety, yet the implementation effect is still debatable, thus more supporting policies are needed, such as enhancing the status of vocational education and the evaluation system; at the chronosystem level, the major source of pressure shifts from family to school when students get into secondary school and high school, which highlights the importance of appropriate change of parental involvement across school levels, as well as the school's important role in students’ mental health education. This study has several limitations. First, the sample size and specificity of context. While the crystallisation approach prioritises depth and multi-faceted understanding within a specific context over generalisability, the focused sampling from Jiangsu province inherently bounds the transferability of the findings. This study documents how educational involution is experienced by these specific participants in such a hyper-competitive provincial context; it can be transferred by the reader to similar socioeducational contexts rather than making generalizable claims about all students, parents, and teachers across the country. While findings of this study are contextually rich for understanding educational involution in similar socioeducational settings, they may not fully capture its manifestations across China's diverse regional landscape. Follow-up research involving participants from other provinces, with particular attention to urban-rural variations, would help to test and expand the patterns identified here. Second, the study's conceptual framing of the digital exosystem through social media, while offering valuable insights, may not fully account for the diversity of digital spaces relevant to educational dynamics, such as schools’ online discussions, or siblings’ or peers’ digital worlds. Variations in how distinct types of digital environments shape or mirror educational involution may not be fully captured. Another limitation is the lack of a more detailed analysis of the recent Double Reduction Policy, which aimed to curb the involution. Future studies, including the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and the intergenerational factor on educational involution, and more discussion on the implementation of the Double Reduction Policy, will hopefully further enhance the comprehensiveness of this research. While the cross-sectional design of this study captures a snapshot of educational involution in time, future longitudinal research is needed to monitor the evolution of this phenomenon, to assess the long-term effects of policies like the Double Reduction Policy, and to understand how parental digital engagement and family dynamics interact with these processes over time.

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Footnotes

Edited by: Michelle Jayman, University of Roehampton London, United Kingdom

Reviewed by: Shixiu Ren, Institue of educational science, Tianjin, China

Pamela Guadalupe Gomez Mendoza, Universidad Autónoma del Estado de México, Mexico