Generation Burnout

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
You're listening to an Airwave Media Podcast.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:04)
Some people think nature is like this, but actually, it's like this.
That's why Columbia engineers everything we make for anything nature can throw at you. Columbia engineered for whatever. Rowhome Productions.

**Jane Perlez** (0:25)
Hi, it's Jane Perlez, and this is Face-Off, Season 3 Can you believe it? I can't. When we started this podcast, many people that I spoke with were confident the US could outsmart China's drive to become the number one world power. But a lot can change in just three years. And as we launch our new season, what had been mere competition has become a dangerous all out struggle with two completely different presidents leading the charge. We have Donald Trump, 79 years old, impetuous, chaotic and vain.

**SPEAKER_4** (1:06)
Look, this is a very competitive world, especially when it comes to China and the US. And we're always watching them and they're always watching us.

**Jane Perlez** (1:15)
Even Trump's handlers are not sure what he's going to say about China or do about it from one day to the next. Seems to depend on which side of the bed he gets out of. And then there's Xi Jinping, 71, a dictator now in his third term, looking ahead to a fourth. He is organized, in charge of a Communist party that bends to his iron will. And from what we can see, he has a streak of vanity too, bragging as he did in his 2025 New Year's address.
China is the responsible superpower in today's tumultuous world, he said. It certainly is a tumultuous relationship between the nations, and what divides the US and China is serious. This season will go deep with the leading thinkers and players on everything from China's military expansion.

**SPEAKER_5** (2:17)
China is one of the pioneers on the forefront of future warfare.

**Jane Perlez** (2:22)
To America's waning image in China and around the world.

**SPEAKER_6** (2:26)
I think it's kind of the spirit of the US., the spirit of America. So long as you try hard, so long as you be a good person, you will be successful. Maybe it can happen 40 years ago. I don't think it will happen today.

**Jane Perlez** (2:40)
To China's vision for the South China Sea.

**SPEAKER_7** (2:43)
They want the South China Sea to be their lake, their own lake.

**Jane Perlez** (2:47)
And will even talk to robots about robotics.

**SPEAKER_8** (2:50)
China is the world's largest robot market and its scale is growing rapidly.

**Jane Perlez** (2:55)
But in the face of what some have called the New Cold War, we wanted to open our season with a look at what the two countries have in common. In the US and China, younger generations are feeling disaffected and disillusioned about the future. It's strange in a way that under such different systems and ways of life, young people have similar sentiments. So today on the show, garbage time. For many Chinese youth, job prospects are grim. The unemployment rate is hovering around 20%. In fact, they're experiencing a kind of stasis with an American nickname.

**Chang Che** (3:37)
So garbage time in Chinese is Lājī Shíjian and it is an American expression. It refers to the period in the end of a sports competition where the opposing team may have scored way too many points. The game is basically over, but you just have to still run out the clock. It's a term that became really popular a couple years ago on Chinese media to describe the kind of post-pandemic malaise that China is in.

**Jane Perlez** (4:08)
Chang Che is our guest on the show today. I first met Chang while working on a short stint in the Seoul Bureau of the New York Times, and he was covering China's tech scene. He has since taken a deep look at post-pandemic China and China's disaffected youth. I started our conversation by asking about the origins of garbage time.

**Chang Che** (4:33)
People who are well-educated in the cities are trying to grasp what it's like to live in post-pandemic China right now, and they're trying to reach for concepts, historical terms that describe this sense of stuckness that they're in. I mean, I think some scholars might call the period, right after the pandemics, the post-reform era.
You know, the reform era, as you know, is the era that started with Deng Xiaoping's reforms and market reforms. It's an era driven by a really powerful economic rise. You know, a lot of people feeling like the tide was lifting all boats. And then, you know, various reasons, partly because of the slowdown of the economy, but also because of the change in the political system, the reform era is over. And I think the garbage time is related to that idea, that there's this kind of new era that we're entering. And it's a way of theorizing this period different from the state. So at the time that the term became really popular online, it was also lambasted by state intellectuals and media, partly because the term, of course, does not accord with this kind of confident, you know, newly assertive, strengthened China. And so I think that's what's interesting about it. It's a kind of grassroots understanding of where China is at today that's very antithetical to the party narrative.