China’s disappointing recovery appears to be suffering another indignity.

Neighbours whose economic fortunes were supposed to be tied to the heft of the country’s rebound from the pandemic seem to be doing pretty well without it. Far from being pushed into a slump, some bellwethers had a thoroughly respectable year.

Bullishness about China was abundant when President Xi Jinping began to dismantle COVID zero at the end of 2022.Credit: AP

Singapore, which had been dogged for part of 2023 by fear of recession, finished strongly. South Korea’s economy closed out December with solid momentum. Markets across Asia have been obsessed with when the Federal Reserve will begin to cut interest rates; the prospect of the People’s Bank of China further reducing borrowing costs is met with a yawn.

Even the slight strengthening in the yuan can be attributed as much to Fed chair Jerome Powell as Beijing’s efforts to put a floor under the expansion.

This isn’t the way things were meant to be. Bullishness about China, and its ability to propel the rest of Asia, was abundant when President Xi Jinping began to dismantle COVID zero in the closing months of 2022.

Prospects for the region were considered intimately linked to Beijing. But as China’s rebound faded, it became commonplace to proclaim that this implied bad tidings for regional economies. That they didn’t bomb suggests there is a broader shift at work.

There was no shortage of people telling me Asia was China and China was Asia. It might be time to question that assertion.

Perhaps Asia’s economic fate isn’t tethered so strongly to China after all. Or, if it is, there are at least some important nuances. Some thinking looks out of date. As a reporter arriving in Washington in 1998, the common refrain was that where Japan goes, so does the rest of Asia. I was sceptical: South-East Asia enjoyed six years of dizzying expansion after Japan’s property bubble burst around 1990. Before leaving the US to undertake my current assignment in Singapore, there was no shortage of people telling me Asia was China and China was Asia. It might be time to question that assertion.

Goldman Sachs Group had a wake-up call. It anchored hopes for a strong 2023 in part on a buoyant China — and the prospect that such encouraging conditions would translate into an epic year for emerging markets, generally.