At the start of 2020 China looked set to deliver the first of the centennial goals its leader Xi Jinping had promised. By 2021, the centenary of the founding of the CPC, China would be a “moderately well off” society and poverty would have been all but vanquished based on the current definition of the poverty line. It had become the second-largest economy in 2010 and an upper-middle-income country. Sure, there were worrying matters, not least the friction between China and the United States over trade, investment and technology. Economic growth had slowed in the 2010s compared with the first three decades after reform began in 1978, but that was to be expected, even though at around 6 per cent a year growth was impressive for such a large economy. Moreover, China had gained an international voice that was stronger than before, some would even say bellicose, as it projected its vision of the future global order through such grandiose schemes as the Belt and Road Initiative.

Less than two months into the year a lot had begun to unravel. A novel coronavirus had taken hold in the central megacity of Wuhan, which led the government to lockdown the country in the third week of January. Rapid spread beyond China soon led to a world pandemic, infecting at least 90 million people with more than two million deaths by early 2021. China's economy massively slid in the early months of the year. China reported its first quarterly GDP contraction of the reform period and the government abandoned in May 2020 predicting the GDP growth rate, which has been the metric by which it and its officials have measured their performance for many years. While the country's success in heading off the virus domestically allowed the economy to begin to recover from late March, the deepening pandemic disrupted the global markets with many economies falling into recession. Of the world's major economies, the IMF (2020) mid-year outlook predicted that only China would record positive growth in 2020 – a paltry 1 per cent – while the United States would grow −8.0 per cent, the EU −10.2 per cent and Japan −5.8 per cent.