Opinion ‘Garbage times’: How China’s online rebellion underlines global confusion

Call it despair, with Chinese characteristics. The buzz among social media users in China is that their country has entered a new historical era, which has been dubbed as “garbage time” — a term used in sports to describe the minutes left on the clock when the results are clear, and there is already a definite winner and a loser. It is obvious which side Chinese internet users find themselves on, in a country where a stagnating economy has led to rising unemployment, surging food prices and a generation that no longer believes in the promise of the “Chinese century”.

This particular use of the term first surfaced in an article written by the editor of a Guangzhou newspaper, ostensibly about “garbage times” of the past — like the Soviet Union’s terminal decline after its 1979 invasion of Afghanistan — but widely agreed to be a veiled reference to Xi Jinping’s China. The government — as it did with precursors of “garbage time”, like “tang ping” (lying flat/giving up) and “neijuan” (inward curling/burnout) — has deployed its mouthpieces to rubbish the notion.

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The Chinese have unique problems, but at a time of global chaos and conflict, record-breaking summer temperatures and super storms, “garbage time” could make for wider usage. How else to describe an epoch when a pile of trash called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch becomes big enough that it shows signs of supporting a coastal ecosystem of its own? From paper to silk, tea to gunpowder, the Chinese have contributed much to the rest of humanity — a new formulation of humour and hopelessness, with which to make sense of a world that resists all such attempts would only be the latest.