‘Garbage time of history’ (1)

Source: NYT (9/13/24)
Dejected Social Media Users Call ‘Garbage Time’ Over China’s Ailing Economy
The sports term refers to a time during a game when defeat becomes inevitable. Officialdom is warning against using it to take veiled jabs at the country’s political and economic system.
By Yan Zhuang

In basketball and other sports, “garbage time” refers to the lackluster period near the end of a game when one team is so far ahead that a comeback is impossible. Teams sub out their best players, and the contest limps toward its inevitable conclusion.

In China, where the internet is heavily censored, a handful of writers have repurposed “garbage time” to indirectly describe the country’s perceived decline. This summer, as the youth unemployment rate soared above 17 percent, the term became a popular shorthand on Chinese social media for describing a sense of hopelessness around the ailing economy.

Commentaries about garbage times of history, some written under pseudonyms, began appearing last year in blog posts and as opinion essays on respected Chinese news sites. They examined past regimes and dynasties and were broadly understood to be thinly veiled critiques of China’s political and economic system. They landed as discussion of the economy — even misplaced praise for the ruling Communist Party’s economic policies — was getting more sensitive.

The commentaries didn’t go unnoticed.

Some were taken down, and state-affiliated academics and news outlets lined up to say that garbage time was a fake concept that misrepresented political and economic theories. Beijing Daily, the city’s main official Communist Party newspaper, said in an editorial that readers should not “spiral into self-pity just because of a few words of incitement with ulterior motives.”

Here’s what the fuss was about.

The writers see earlier garbage time in China and beyond

The commentaries argued that rulers throughout history have fallen into garbage time by centralizing power, rejecting free trade or losing public trust. Some even suggested that any societies that were not capitalist democracies were doomed to fail.

Some examined other state-controlled economies. One from November said that the Soviet Union had been in garbage time for its entire existence. The article, which cited the writings of an Austrian philosopher who championed free markets and argued against socialism, argued that the U.S.S.R.’s planned economy and undemocratic government made its collapse inevitable.

Others looked at Chinese history. One opinion essay from February argued that Zhu Yuanzhang, who served as the Ming dynasty’s first emperor in the 14th century, plunged the entire 276-year regime into garbage time by monopolizing power, introducing isolationist trade policies and imposing harsh laws. The piece contrasted that failure with the flourishing of Britain’s economy during the Industrial Revolution in the 18th and 19th centuries, attributing the success to colonialism and free-trade policies.

A December blog post about the Qing, China’s last dynasty, argued that its garbage time began in 1901, a decade before its downfall. The trouble started when the public lost faith in its leaders once the reigning empress, Cixi, fled after foreign troops suppressed a peasant uprising she had backed, the author wrote.

Although the Qing had previously suffered defeats, this was the first to be felt widely by the public, the blog post said. As a result, it shattered the widespread perception that the dynasty was still on the rise.

The garbage time pieces implicitly challenged the government

Even though the commentaries didn’t mention modern China or the Communist Party, experts say they implicitly challenged the country’s authoritarian governance and state-controlled economy. In that sense, they were part of a Chinese literary tradition of intellectuals avoiding censorship by criticizing rulers through historical allegories.

“The real argument, the key, is actually about the legitimacy of the party,” said Xiao Qiang, a researcher on internet freedom at the University of California, Berkeley, who tracked some of the discussion around and censorship of garbage time commentaries.

The concept of garbage time, and the idea that societies will inevitably collapse without economic concepts like free trade, contradicts the Marxist idea of historical inevitability that the Chinese government promotes, said Isabella Jackson, an assistant professor of Chinese history at Trinity College Dublin. That narrative argues that through class struggle all societies will eventually transition from capitalism to socialism to communism.

The commentaries seem to be aimed more at making a particular argument than accurately portraying history, Professor Jackson added. Dismissing the whole Ming dynasty as garbage time is an oversimplification of a court that flourished during its peak, she said. Among other things, literature thrived, and Ming mariners undertook seven massive trade and diplomatic expeditions to regions like East Africa and the Persian Gulf.

Still, she said, “You can see the point that a lot of things that were celebrated didn’t really benefit ordinary people.”

Chinese officialdom called the term malicious

The phrase’s online popularity appears to have peaked in July, shortly before top officials gathered for a meeting to set the direction of China’s economy. Many economists had called for a shift from investment-led growth toward consumer spending, but the meeting ended with few signs of a fundamental policy rethink.

As the state media tried to get the Chinese public excited about the meeting, some outlets and commentators accused those who used “garbage time” of sowing pessimism and idealizing Western values. Ming Jinwei, a former journalist at the state news agency Xinhua, said the concept had been coined by a small group of “petty bourgeois intellectuals.”

Academics chimed in. In a commencement speech, Qiao Liu, a dean at Peking University, warned students not to fall into “narrative traps” like garbage time that can be used to distort facts, influence people’s behavior and have negative consequences for the economy.

Wang Wen, the dean of financial studies at Renmin University in Beijing, wrote on a state-affiliated economics site that the concept was more malicious than the “lying flat” trend in which Chinese young people advocate a restful life over one defined by hustling. He said that garbage time arguments encouraged inaction and “completely denied China’s growth.”

Mr. Wang acknowledged that the phrase’s popularity reflected broader anxieties and showed the need for urgent changes that would bolster the economy and ease people’s concerns.

If they could feel their lives improving, he wrote, “The harmful effects of these counterfeit, false concepts will be neutralized.”

Yan Zhuang is a Times reporter in Seoul who covers breaking news. More about Yan Zhuang