Global Impact: China ends 2022 with a bang with the end of zero-Covid, but what’s around the corner in 2023?

Name: China 2022 Year in Review
Uploaded: 2023-01-03T06:00:17.000Z
Duration: 11 min 42 s
Description: China 2022 Year in Review

Global Impact is a fortnightly curated newsletter featuring a news topic originating in China with a significant macro impact for our newsreaders around the world

In this edition, we look back at the events that unfolded in 2022 and also looks ahead to what we can expect in 2023.

7-MIN READ7-MIN

The coronavirus again dominated all walks of life, while the deaths of Queen Elizabeth and Shinzo Abe will long live in the memory. Photo: AP

Chow Chung-yan

Published: 2:00pm, 3 Jan 2023

The year 2022 ended with a bang, with China suddenly relaxing its Covid-19 restrictions after three years of what amounted to the strictest social control measures in recent history.

Having kept the deadly virus at bay for most of the pandemic, the nation is now buried under an avalanche of cases, with millions falling sick and dead bodies piling up fast at Chinese hospitals and morgues.

The changes are as abrupt as they are consequential, and this is a befitting end for a year full of dramatic and monumental events.

For many, this is truly a year hard to forget: we have witnessed a large-scale war breaking out in Ukraine; an escalating food and energy crisis spreading across the world; the global economy edging towards the brink of deep recessions and leadership changes in mainland China, Hong Kong and other parts of the world.

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China 2022 Year in Review

In the United Kingdom, the post of prime minister changed hands three times before the year was out. Political turmoil continued to rock the island nation, which also lost its longest-serving and most iconic monarch in modern times.

In Japan, a former prime minister was gunned down in broad daylight, while in the US, a former president was simultaneously fighting against mounting legal problems that could send him to prison and plotting a political comeback that would put him in the White House again and make history.

Geopolitical tensions intensified in Asia, with the US and China locking horns over almost every arena.

The People’s Liberation Army crossed the median line of the Taiwan Strait for the first time as Beijing staged the largest war game in years to protest the controversial visit by American politician Nancy Pelosi to the self-governed island of Taiwan. For weeks, the world watched in jitters if another war would break out in the Pacific as it earlier did in Ukraine.

02:27

Inside an overcrowded Beijing hospital struggling with Covid surge in China