First, the word: “Juan”

If you sell anything today, you already feel it — you just might not have the word. You drop your price, a competitor drops lower by lunch. You spend more on ads, so does everyone else. You work harder every quarter just to stand still. The Chinese have a name for that treadmill: juan.

It’s short for neijuan (内卷) — “involution.” It describes competition so intense that effort keeps climbing while everyone’s returns shrink. Margins get slashed, ad budgets balloon, products blur into one another, and in the end there are no real winners — only exhausted players and a platform collecting the toll. A downward spiral, dressed up as hustle.

And now it’s landed in Malaysia

This isn’t a far-off China problem anymore. The price war has crossed the border. Chinese e-commerce platforms have poured into Malaysia, and they’ve brought the involution playbook with them: scale fast, price low, capture attention.

Temu arrived and, through heavy advertising, free-shipping incentives and rock-bottom pricing, quickly won over bargain-hunting Malaysian shoppers with goods far cheaper than local platforms could match. Taobao rolled out English and Bahasa Malaysia interfaces. TikTok Shop turned scrolling into buying. Shoppers are delighted. Local vendors are not — because when the market is flooded with near-identical products at prices no local margin can survive, the “price wall” goes up, and homegrown sellers get boxed out of their own backyard.

That’s the trap in a sentence: when someone else is always willing to go lower, competing on price alone is a fight you cannot win.

Even Beijing tried to stop it — and couldn’t

Here’s how serious this is: the country that produced involution is now fighting it. In mid-2025 Beijing launched an official “anti-involution” campaign, with policymakers up to Xi Jinping publicly calling out

the endless price-cutting as a zero-sum race to the bottom that leaves whole industries worse off — from EVs and solar to food delivery.

And yet the treadmill keeps running. Analysts note the campaign hasn’t solved the underlying problem: unproductive firms keep operating, and even the government has sent mixed signals — continuing some price subsidies while telling everyone to stop competing on price. If the state can’t switch off the price war from the top, no single brand can wait for rescue. The lesson is blunt: nobody is coming to fix your margins. The only lever fully in your hands is your own brand.

So stop fighting on price. Position instead.

When competition is this brutal, the answer isn’t to shout louder or discount deeper. It’s to make yourself hard to compare. And that starts with something most brands never do properly: explaining, clearly and sharply, who you are and why you exist.

“A skincare brand” is a commodity — interchangeable, price-shoppable, doomed to the wall. “The barrier-repair balm for runners who train before sunrise” is a decision. The moment your brand stands for something specific, the ¥2-cheaper competitor stops being your competitor at all, because the customer is no longer comparing the same thing. Positioning is what takes you off the price ladder and onto your own ground.

Get this right and everything else — packaging, tone, the story you tell, the price you can charge — finally has something solid to stand on.

The switch: real quality, told as a story

Positioning tells people where you stand. Quality and story are what make them believe it — and stay. A factory can copy your product by Friday. What it can’t copy is a genuine standard of quality and the true story behind it: why you started, what you refuse to compromise on, who’s behind the counter. That combination is the one moat a price-cutter can’t tunnel under.

This isn’t wishful thinking. Look at three Chinese brands that walked straight out of the price war by doing exactly this — and the numbers they posted while everyone around them bled on margin.

Laopu Gold — heritage instead of grams

Gold is the ultimate commodity: every jeweller quotes the daily spot price and competes by the gram. Laopu refused to play. It sells heritage handcraft — reviving centuries-old Chinese goldsmithing — at fixed prices, so you’re buying the story and the craft, not the metal. The result: gross margins above 40% while rivals scrape by on 8–22%, and first-half 2025 revenue up roughly 250% year-on-year to RMB 12.35 billion. Since its 2024 Hong Kong listing the stock has climbed more than fourteen-fold. The tell that it has fully escaped juan: when Laopu raises prices, demand goes up.

Pop Mart — a character, not a plastic figure

Anyone can mould a vinyl toy. Pop Mart sells characters and the thrill of the blind box — an IP-and-story engine around Labubu, Molly and friends. In 2025 revenue jumped about 185% to RMB 37.12 billion (around US$5.4 billion), net profit tripled to roughly RMB 13 billion, and gross margin expanded to 72%. Labubu alone brought in over RMB 14 billion. Story turned a toy into a global phenomenon that made Pop Mart worth more than Mattel and Sanrio combined.

Mixue — identity that scales at one dollar

Proof that this isn’t only a luxury move. Mixue sells ice cream and tea for about a dollar — squarely in price-war territory — yet wins on identity, not just cost: the snow-white mascot, the jingle, a fanatically owned supply chain, and a story of cheerful affordability. In 2025 revenue rose 35% to RMB 33.56 billion (about US$4.9 billion) and net profit climbed 33%, defying the very price war engulfing its rivals. It now runs nearly 60,000 stores — the world’s largest F&B chain by outlet count, bigger than McDonald’s and Starbucks.

Three different price points. One identical move: they stopped letting the market price them by the gram, and gave people a reason to care that had nothing to do with being cheapest.

The secret: how to actually build your story

Here’s the part most brands get wrong. A brand story isn’t the paragraph on your About page nobody reads. It’s the answer to five questions — and each honest answer is a wall a price-cutter can’t climb over. Work through them in order:

• Who’s the enemy? What’s broken or compromised in your category that you exist to fix? Every story worth telling stands against something.
• Who’s it for? Not “women 25–40.” One real person, with a name in your head and a life you can picture. Write for them and the niche writes itself.
• What did it cost you? Show the work nobody sees — the sourcing, the rejected batches, the choice that was more expensive but right. Effort is proof of quality.
• What do you believe? The value your customer buys into, not just the product they buy. That’s what turns a transaction into loyalty.
• How do they join? End with a door, not a discount. Give people something to belong to — that’s what pulls them off the algorithm and keeps them.

Answer those five with something true, back it with real quality, and you stop being one more interchangeable seller behind the price wall. You become the brand people look for by name.

A price war has one winner: the platform. A story has one owner — you.

Curious what could make your brand genuinely popular abroad — don’t enter price war? Let’s build the story that gets you there. Message us for more insights.