China will show its resilience again in 2023

At the end of 2022, China’s Covid measures have seen drastic changes, with eased local rules regarding nucleic acid testing, full accessibility of public transport and venues and the complete abolishment of the Health Code system. This has caused a major outbreak of Covid-19 across China, with a large part of the population being affected, causing quite some chaos in hospitals and medicine supplies.

Although from abroad you may have had the impression that there was a ‘standstill’ in China in the past 3 years, the reality is quite different: despite Covid and a lot of other economic and social challenges, Chinese companies have continued to develop and innovate in the past years. Understandably, a lot of European companies decided to postpone or even cancel their China plans, but regrettably it can be assumed that a number of opportunities in China for European companies may have already passed in the meantime.

Therefore, if you still have China on your agenda, you should urgently start getting ready for China again.

Having travelled to China almost 100 times and having personally lived China’s development in the past 25 years, it can be expected that China will show its resilience again in 2023. Yes, probably for the first time in the past 3 decades, the Covid-19 pandemic has created a great pressure on China’s economy and social stability in this huge country. However, also in the past 3 decades China has had its share of crises. Take for example the Asian financial crisis at the end of the nineties, the SARS epidemic in 2003, the 2008 global financial crisis and the stock market crash in 2015. Despite these crises, China managed to keep up its high GDP growth rates for more than 20 years.

Also today China has its problems, such as the real estate crisis, high unemployment rates, supply chain issues, etc. But the enormous country has been under fast development for a very long time. The Chinese generation of millennials, born in the nineties or in the years 2000, have known a country that has been growing with an average of 10% per year. Different from our Western countries, it can be acknowledged that change is part of China’s DNA and this generation of Chinese is not afraid of change. Consequently, it can be expected that China’s population will start consuming, traveling and spending money again very soon, to compensate for the long and stressful times in lockdowns and zero-covid restrictions.

China’s GDP growth since the Covid-19 outbreak (source: tradingeconomics.com)

If you need assistance for your China project in 2023 or need free consultation, don’t hesitate to contact us.