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The Garbage Time of History
Is the reason China’s rise or America’s fall?
As Beijing and Washington struggle for soft power, China experts are seeing a “vibe shift”. Online media frequently contrast China’s rapid advancement in technology and infrastructure with perceived decline in the United States and other Western nations.
China’s ascendance has been breathtaking. It’s not the same place as when I first studied in Beijing in 1986. Then, bicycles filled the streets. Now more than 40 Chinese cities have metro systems far more modern than any American city.
Might the United States, conversely, be in “garbage time”? This concept has made a round trip from the US to China and back.
The term “garbage time” comes from American sports. It describes the final minutes of a blowout game, when the winner’s lead is too great to overcome. The term is used in basketball and football — sports with a fixed game clock. During garbage time, coaches substitute bench warmers for star players, reducing the quality of play.
Are nations or civilisations subject to such time limits? Does it make sense to talk about the “garbage time of history”? How might this notion affect understandings of nations, culture and personal responsibility? Might it apply to humanity in the face of the climate crisis? Or facing the existential risk that AI may destroy humanity?
The trope “garbage time of history” (历史的垃圾时间) initially appeared in September 2023 on the Chinese social media platform WeChat. In “Garbage Time of History: Culture’s Long Vacation”, the essayist Hu Wenhui used the phrase to characterise the period when nothing can prevent an empire’s ultimate collapse.
A newspaper editor in Guangzhou, in the world’s largest megalopolis, Hu carefully avoided any reference to contemporary China. The Soviet Union, Hu’s essay begins, fell into garbage time after Brezhnev’s 1979 invasion of Afghanistan. Gorbachev, he continues, simply “expedited the end”. Hu also applies the concept to the long periods of decline in China’s Zhou, Tang, Ming and Qing Dynasties.
For Hu, when political systems stall, culture can still flourish in a long, quiet “vacation”. Distinguishing the vastness of history from the individual’s insignificance, Hu invokes a Confucian maxim: “When the Way prevails under Heaven, show yourself; when the Way does not prevail, hide.” During history’s garbage time, the individual may be politically powerless, yet still enjoy freedom of expression in the personal and cultural realms.
Citing examples of great Chinese writers who lived during periods of historical garbage time, Hu concludes, “History is vast, yet life is fleeting; it must never be squandered. History may have its ‘garbage time’—but human life does not.”
In July 2024, “garbage time of history” went viral as Chinese netizens used the phrase to express pessimism about China’s future. An aggressive state-backed clampdown swiftly followed.
Joining the government’s pushback against “garbage time”, the Beijing Daily––the official organ of the CCP’s municipal Propaganda Department––dismissed the idea as a “false proposition not worth refuting”. Other critics called it a “logical fallacy”, a “false academic concept”, or a “narrative trap”.
Censors deleted Hu Wenhui’s original article and scrubbed mentions of garbage time from social and other media. Inside China’s firewall, only authorised rebuttals remain. To avoid automated filters, netizens now avoid typing the precise phrase, but the trope still has currency.
“Garbage time of history” recalls earlier influential memes expressing cynicism about China. The stakes of containing discontent have long been high.
In September 2020, netizens popularised the term “involution” (内卷, literally “rolling inward”) to describe relentless striving for diminishing benefit. Amidst gruelling, zero-sum competition, the term suggests that people work harder and harder but achieve fewer rewards. The term went viral after a video circulated online showing a student working on his laptop while riding a bicycle at the elite Tsinghua University campus.
In 2021, another meme, “lying flat” (躺平) grew into a subculture. In April, former factory worker Luo Huazhong posted “Lying Flat is Righteous”, an online manifesto about quitting the rat race and living minimally.
On the 3rd of June, the musician Zhang Busan posted a satirical video, “Lying Flat Is the Way of the King”. Clad in shorts and a baseball cap, Zhang lay on a couch strumming his guitar to critique China’s “996” work culture. (9 a.m. to 9 p.m. six days a week.)
Within 24 hours, state censors wiped the video from multiple platforms, only for it to resurface on YouTube.
“Lying Flat” was a response to involution. Instead of burning out at work, young people could reject societal expectations to marry, buy property, and get ahead professionally. The movement still speaks to youth who renounce the heated pursuit of status, money, possessions, and the “Chinese Dream“.
As cynicism deepened, in the spring of 2022, lying flat evolved into “let it rot” (摆烂). Basketball fans in China first coined the phrase to riff on the American word “tanking”, when a team deliberately loses games to receive a better draft pick for the next season. Frustrated by seemingly unattainable goals, netizens popularised “let it rot” as a mantra for embracing decay and giving up.
The “let it rot” meme in China has an echo in “bed rotting”, American Gen Z’s shorthand for spending hours in bed awake, often while scrolling on digital devices. Like “let it rot”, for some, bed rotting resists “hustle culture” in the interest of self-care.
In each of these cases, the Chinese government responded not only with censorship but also with articles criticising the terms and those who use them. (These responses may have amplified the terms’ popularity.)
Disaffected citizens continue to use or allude to the catchphrases to express discouragement about high youth unemployment, precarious and poorly paid work, the burst of the housing market bubble, and other economic and social challenges.
Debates about “garbage time of history” have been fierce in China, where it is part of a broader Sinopessimism. More to the government’s liking, critics there have also applied the concept to the United States.
In July 2024, during the meme’s viral peak, the financial news and information service Sina Finance featured an article applying the concept to the US. For the author, more than two decades of draining warfare in the Middle East, the 2007 subprime mortgage crisis, and the 2008 financial crisis signalled the failure of neoliberalism and the end of America’s “golden age”.
The article’s title evokes the United States’ long tradition of political violence: “Gunshots Ring Out, America Has Entered Historical Garbage Time”. But its focus is on the devolution of electoral politics into hate politics, the concentration of wealth and worsening plight of the poor, and America’s decline in economic, technological, and industrial competitiveness.
The article argues that structural weaknesses belie the illusion that America’s difficulties might be merely temporary. Endless “ballot-box politics” under capitalism inevitably squander resources. The military-industrial complex stokes conflicts around the globe, further draining the nation’s strength.
US political and business elites, the article reiterates, have colluded to control the executive, legislative, and judicial powers, as well as the media: “They have reduced the state apparatus to a mere instrument serving their interests.” The ultra-rich are devouring an ever larger share of the pie, aggravating extreme poverty and leading to a surge in populism and the rise of Trump.
Another major fault line is America’s declining investment in infrastructure and education. The article does not offer concrete examples, but they are easy to find. For one, China operates more than 50,000 kilometres of high-speed rail, while the US and the UK struggle with massive delays, high costs, and limited networks.
The “US-instigated” great-power rivalry with China is accelerating America’s collapse and disintegration. Despite serious domestic challenges, the US government has chosen confrontation rather than cooperation with China.
In this narrative, China has been compelled to push back against American hegemony in self-defence. More ready to survive uncertainties and a new world disorder, China is navigating a “hot peace” in which a Pax Sinica is replacing a crumbling Pax Americana.
The _Sina Finance_ article closes with a dire prediction. Unlike China, with its successive dynasties, the Roman Empire, once it fell, wasn’t reborn, and the West entered the Middle Ages. The article predicts that the US-led West may well fall into another 500-1,000 years of Middle Ages, lagging behind the East.
I hesitated to write this article. The garbage time of history could be a dangerous concept. It could encourage fatalism and passivity.
The climate crisis may offer the most literal instantiation of historical garbage time. Capitalism’s economic model built on infinite growth is colliding with a planet of finite resources. Might we have reached a tipping point as we burn through the remaining “minutes” of ecological stability?
Rather than despairing that the die is cast, we need to implement mitigation strategies. Climate change is not a binary win/lose game, but a continuum of consequences.
Tropes such as garbage time offer neat narratives, but they disregard the contingent nature of history. History rarely has time limits, and it does not move linearly toward a fixed, inevitable conclusion. Acknowledging a ticking clock might spur action and change. Adaptation could still influence outcomes.
For the West, avoiding garbage time depends on reckoning with the “tsunami of transformation coming from China”. China is no longer catching up, but leading in many areas of development.
Could late-stage capitalism be in garbage time? How sustainable is rampant financialisation, enshittification, stagnant wages, and soaring cost of living? Most urgently, might the AI race have led capitalism into garbage time?
Existential threats loom large. In China, experts also worry that the government’s massive investment in AI may hurt the economy. AI is displacing both white-collar and blue-collar jobs, accelerating a recession and downgrading quality of life.
At the US-China summit last week, Presidents Trump and Xi made clear their differing views on AI safety and purpose. Dismissing the need for guardrails, Trump says the US “totally rejects any attempt to construct a globalist scheme” on AI. Xi maintains that the two nations must “ensure that the development of AI is always under human control and serves the well-being of the people”.
Belief in garbage time can be a rationale for the excesses of late-stage capitalism. If the United States is in garbage time, corporations have no disincentive to put profits above the public good and human safety. Xi’s insistence that China and the US “manage AI for good” refutes such resignation to garbage time.
I’ve unpacked the concept of garbage time to highlight these stakes. I don’t believe in historical garbage time, and I don’t believe that tech billionaires and oil oligarchs have won the game against the rest of us.
_Photograph courtesy ofFernanda Japa. Published under a Creative Commons license._
