Since joining the WTO in 2001, China’s role in the world has been under intense scrutiny. As China continues its unique path of development, it must strike compromises with the international community just as the international community must compromise with China.

Widespread lockdowns and border closures aimed at combating the COVID-19 pandemic have interrupted global supply chains and largely paralyzed the global economy. Yet, the real weakness of today’s global economy is not the vulnerability of its globalized production networks, but rather souring attitudes toward globalization – and toward China in particular.

Back in 2013, the Chinese government laid out a policy agenda that promised real reforms to an economy laden with debt and distorted by the influence of the country’s large state-owned enterprise (SOE) sector. But instead of seeing that agenda through, China chose to dodge the risks entailed by marketization, and has since reverted to what it knows best: state control over the economy and the semblance of stability that comes with it.

China’s is increasing the pace of integration into the global economy through an innovative approach on the island province. Its many inducements, including entry to the mainland, are expected to attract investment.

A great deal of interest is focussed on the level of Chinese real GDP in 2020. The Chinese GDP in 2020 depends crucially on two developments—the speed of the economic recovery from the COVID-19 epidemic and the availability of additional economic stimulus.

While the fast-changing nature of COVID-19 makes economic interventions difficult to predict, China's uneven economic recovery may serve as a roadmap for other countries overcoming the outbreak.

China appears to have considerable room to maneuver in terms of monetary policy. It also has an enormous domestic market and a middle class as large as the European Union. But this doesn’t mean it is turning inward.

The novel coronavirus outbreak in the lead-up to the 2020 Chinese Spring Festival has inflicted great pain on tens of thousands of patients and their families, involving countless courageous Chinese citizens, who otherwise would have spent the holiday with their families and friends, in an unprecedented anti-virus war.

The world economy has clearly caught a cold. The outbreak of COVID-19 came at a particularly vulnerable point in the global business cycle. World output expanded by just 2.9% in 2019 – the slowest pace since the 2008-09 global financial crisis and just 0.4 percentage points above the 2.5% threshold typically associated with global recession.

In addition to the devastating human toll of the coronavirus outbreak, the economic damage of a manufacturing shutdown in China is likely to be profound.