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.
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.
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.
