In basketball and other sports, “garbage time” refers to the lackluster period near the end of a game when one team is so far ahead that a comeback is impossible. Teams sub out their best players, and the contest limps toward its inevitable conclusion.

In China, where the internet is heavily censored, a handful of writers have repurposed “garbage time” to indirectly describe the country’s perceived decline. This summer, as the youth unemployment rate soared above 17 percent, the term became a popular shorthand on Chinese social media for describing a sense of hopelessness around the ailing economy.

Commentaries about garbage times of history, some written under pseudonyms, began appearing last year in blog posts and as opinion essays on respected Chinese news sites. They examined past regimes and dynasties and were broadly understood to be thinly veiled critiques of China’s political and economic system. They landed as discussion of the economy — even misplaced praise for the ruling Communist Party’s economic policies — was getting more sensitive.

The commentaries didn’t go unnoticed.

Some were taken down, and state-affiliated academics and news outlets lined up to say that garbage time was a fake concept that misrepresented political and economic theories. Beijing Daily, the city’s main official Communist Party newspaper, said in an editorial that readers should not “spiral into self-pity just because of a few words of incitement with ulterior motives.”

Here’s what the fuss was about.

The writers see earlier garbage time in China and beyond.

The commentaries argued that rulers throughout history have fallen into garbage time by centralizing power, rejecting free trade or losing public trust. Some even suggested that any societies that were not capitalist democracies were doomed to fail.