In China, many social media users began using the meme "garbage time" (a sports terminology) to criticize the state of the economy.

As that meme grew here in 2024, China's central authorities began cracking down on it.

But many Chinese citizens are adept at moving around censorship. When desiring to criticize the current state of the Chinese economy, many of them will instead bring up historical examples of prior Chinese dynasties that made similar errors, and draw clear parallels to the present, while maintaining plausible deniability and difficulty of censorship.

Pretty interesting. My hat is off to the Chinese social media users working around top-down censorship with memes and historical analogies.