In this paper, I focus on the discursive construction of “involution”, a buzzword that has dominated major online platforms in China since early 2019. Coined in Geertz’s (1963) anthropology of the non-progress refinement of agricultural labor, the term has been extensively engaged in the social sciences of China in the last three years which, however, seem to rely on the taken-for-granted theoretical models whilst leave underexplored the real-life complexities mediated by the saturation of the term in everyday communication (Zhang 2020). Interpellated by this critique, I argue for a keyword approach (Williams 1976) that ties the analysis down to the situated meaning-making of “involution”, with specific attention to its anchorage in a surge of public concerns in China about the national recession caused by China–United States Trade War and COVID-19. Drawing on a two-year online ethnography, I trace the genealogy of “involution” via reviewing the iconic events on Chinese social media (e.g., discussions about ‘996’) that brought about the nation-wide criticism on the extreme competition, overpopulation, and exploitation of the labor market and which channeled the emergence of the term across social domains. Using a popular online post about “involution” – primary school students in Beijing went to the North Pole for a graduation trip – and its comment section as an example, I showcase the process in which “involution”, despite its obscure meaning, is mobilized by social actors from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds to establish a genred form of self-identification that points to the perceived state of permanent social immobility faced by what is imagined as the entire Chinese population. Based on this analysis, I argue that “involution” as a societal keyword reshapes the lived experiences of the long-standing material and symbolic inequalities, which is deeply interwoven with the larger institutional infrastructure of residency, education, and internal/transnational mobility in modern China.