I am a jianbing guozi enthusiast. I have consumed a considerable number of jianbing guozi in Xi'an, Beijing, and Tianjin — you could call me half an expert. But in recent years, I've rarely eaten jianbing guozi, because jianbing in Xi'an have universally started including shredded potatoes by default. This makes me furious. First, because jianbing guozi should not include shredded potatoes — it doesn't taste good. Second, because I can't stand this kind of work ethic. When I was in school, Xi'an had many street food vendors, and a considerable number of them demonstrated remarkable craftsmanship. This sort of thing constituted a city's pride. When you start stuffing shredded potatoes into jianbing guozi, you've abandoned the pursuit of excellence in your craft and degraded the spirit of this ancient capital. As the saying goes, from a single spot one can see the whole leopard — I believe the shredded-potato-in-jianbing phenomenon is truly a symbol of a city's spiritual decline. This is no exaggeration. You'll notice that the quality of roasted sweet potatoes, roasted chestnuts, baked naan, and Tujia-style flatbreads has also been declining severely. Meanwhile, rocket launch failures have been increasing too.
When I asked a jianbing vendor with great interest why he included shredded potatoes, he said: everyone else adds them — if you don't, nobody buys. That confirmed my suspicion — this is, likewise, a matter of work ethic. Whether jianbing guozi should include shredded potatoes is a question of taste. You could say you think it tastes better with them — that would be an incorrect but at least reasoned argument, and we could explore, measure, and optimize from the angle of what makes it delicious. But saying "everyone else does it" — that's a logical fallacy, and it means you don't care about taste at all. A street food vendor who doesn't care about taste, an official who doesn't care about the people — can they do their job well?
Of course, there is a fashionable explanation for this: it is called "involution" in jianbing guozi production methods — juan for short. Because everyone else adds the potatoes, you can't not add them; if you don't, your product won't sell. So we attribute it to competition and conclude that it represents excessive effort. But this is wrong. Quite the contrary — this is a textbook case of insufficient effort. The reason your jianbing guozi won't sell without shredded potatoes isn't the absence of shredded potatoes — it's because your jianbing is poorly made. Are your ingredient ratios right? Is your heat control right? Are your greens washed clean? Are your crispy crackers well-made? Nothing is right across the board, which is why a true jianbing expert like myself won't touch it. You can only hoodwink those more tolerant friends who are in a hurry and don't mind the potatoes. In fact, Huangtaiji — the jianbing chain in Beijing that rented storefronts next to Subway — doesn't add shredded potatoes, or at least doesn't add them by default. This doesn't mean Huangtaiji's jianbing is necessarily good, but it eloquently disproves the notion that jianbing without shredded potatoes can't sell.
Taking this further, doing anything well requires what Kazuo Inamori called "effort that surpasses anyone else's." Making a great jianbing demands exquisite skill and a conscientious attitude. You cannot substantially improve the quality of your jianbing by adding or not adding shredded potatoes. Perhaps there exists a correct way to include shredded potatoes — given that our country is promoting the use of potatoes as a staple food, this might not be entirely inadvisable. But the real question is: have we set the right goals for jianbing-making? Do we care about health and flavor? Are we putting in the effort to do this well?
The jianbing community in Xi'an is clearly not doing this. Perhaps there's some logic to calling it juan — rolling a jianbing. But this juan alone cannot explain the decline of Xi'an's jianbing. Correct understanding and genuine effort are what it takes to make a good jianbing.
On another note, it is unwise to use juan (involution) to label all competition. Competition exists objectively, and we cannot change its nature merely through language. Take industrial competition, for instance — its existence is objective, and as an objective reality it has both advantages and disadvantages. "Involution" describes one response to such competition: increasing per-unit inputs at a low level. But this same competition also drives offensive-minded competitors to innovate and increase overall welfare. The process is cruel, of course — but this is real life, and we must live with real life.