Joe Cash
BEIJING (Reuters) – China’s economic slowdown has sparked a surge in online idioms describing this “garbage period of history” as a sign of pessimism about the outlook for better jobs, incomes and opportunity.
The clearly Chinese-made phrase introduced a basketball term — the turbulent final minutes when the outcome of a game is no longer in doubt — into what started as a debate about history and then became a heavily censored online discussion about whether Chinese workers and investors should give up.
China’s latest economic data has shaken confidence, with growth slowing to a weaker-than-expected 4.7 percent last quarter, highlighting the drag from a lingering real estate crisis and sluggish consumption.
China’s Communist Party leaders concluded a closed-door meeting on Thursday at which they are expected to lay out details of Beijing’s economic strategy for the coming years, including measures to promote technology. China Daily reported in a front-page story on Wednesday that one of the goals of the meeting was to restore confidence in China’s “long-term economic trajectory.”
“Garbage time” is a fatalistic tag that has become popular on social media platforms over the past month, gaining more traction recently after state media and commentators came together to denounce the phrase and its suggestion that China’s economic slowdown will be followed by continued decline.
“It is a catchphrase that implies there is no help or hope, and which denies and belittles everything in China,” the Beijing Daily said in an editorial last week.
This follows another buzzword that has been targeted by Chinese censors as a threat to stability since it entered the mainstream three years ago: “lying down,” a call for refraining from ambition and living a lazy life of quiet protest.
Wang Wen, a finance professor at Renmin University of China and a former columnist for state-run Global Times, said earlier this month that the idea of an era of garbage time was “more dangerous” because it contained an implicit message of despair.
“This is a complete denial of China’s current development situation and an attempt to raise people’s expectations that the country will ultimately fail.”
The term was first mentioned on the Chinese internet last September by Hu Wenhui, an editor at a small publishing house in Guangzhou. In an article that has since been censored, Hu argued that the history of the Soviet Union and several Chinese dynasties since 1979 suggested that certain historical failures were inevitable, something some have read as an implicit comment on current events.
“When the overall situation is decided and defeat is inevitable no matter how hard we try, it is just a futile struggle,” Hu said. “How should people who are unlucky enough to encounter a garbage period in history act?”
Hu could not be reached for comment.
The topic seemed to garner online attention in June, with some on the social media platform Weibo saying the idea resonated with ordinary people, in comments still visible this week. “A lot of people are starting to feel like this is a garbage period in history unless we can change anything,” one person said.
There are other signs that collective trust in China is eroding, according to survey data compiled by Stanford University professor Scott Rozelle and others and published last week by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a U.S. think tank.
Rozelle found that Chinese respondents to the survey are more pessimistic than they were 20 years ago, more likely to blame structural factors for whether someone is rich or poor, and much less likely to believe that hard work pays off.
In 2004, 62% agreed that “hard work always pays off in our country.” In the 2023 survey, that percentage had dropped to 28%.
(Writing by Kevin Krolicki; Editing by Kim Coghill)
