Whilst the extant literature on the publish-or-perish culture in the West is plentiful, there remains surprisingly little scholarship exploring the ways managerialist policies have become integral to local identities, work and life in Chinese universities. We address this gap by taking China's endeavour to become first in the global higher education field as an entry point and reflecting on our lived experiences as early career researchers (ECRs) in the form of a duoethnography. Our dialogues consider how, and with what effects, Chinese higher education privileges the notion of research excellence and works to construct professional identities. As grassroots ECRs epitomising a force to negotiate, challenge and resist the contemporary research order from below, we identify academic publishing as 'the best strategy' to get ahead in the academic game. Despite our compliance with the regime of new managerialism, our narratives also suggest that we are attempting to resist the drive for research productivity through envisaging a slower tempo in writing and aspiring for greater reflection. We provide readers with a range of individual- and collective-based strategies for being and progressing as grassroots ECRs, and implications for universities are also discussed at the end of the article.