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From worst to best in Asia 2024

Published: 29 Dec. 2024, 19:42 Updated: 30 Dec. 2024, 14:54

Curtis S. Chin & Jose B. Collazo
Curtis S. Chin, a former U.S. ambassador to the Asian Development Bank, is managing director of advisory firm RiverPeak Group. Jose B. Collazo is an analyst focusing on the Indo-Pacific region. Follow them on X at@CurtisSChin and@JoseBCollazo.

When we once again took to international business news outlet CNBC at the year’s end to announce our choices for our annual Asia Year in Review, reasonable people might well have thought South Korean politics would be a natural choice for the dubious distinction of “worst year in Asia.”

The real-life Korean drama that is domestic presidential politics is, however, still playing out in 2025. For now, at least though, it seems that all are united in mourning the lives lost in the tragic crash landing of a Jeju Air flight in Muan.

In 2023, we gave “best year” to India’s space agency, ISRO, for lifting spirits with a successful mission to the moon, building on a record of “frugal engineering.” The “worst year” went to Asia’s most vulnerable, including in Afghanistan and Myanmar, who were all too forgotten as headlines moved on.

Here’s our look at the Indo-Pacific region’s year that was. Amid the upheaval and tragedy, Korea also makes our 2024 list in a more welcome, positive way.

1. Super Typhoon Yagi hitting Ha Long, Vietnam, Sept. 8.
2. A medical staff member feeding a newborn in a hospital in China.
3. President Yoon Suk Yeol declares emergency martial law on Dec. 3.
4. People taking picture of a doll of Young-hee to promote Netflix’s South Korean series “Squid Game Season 2” at Gwanghwamun Square in Seoul.
5. Female pygmy hippo “Moo Deng” at a zoo in Thailand, Sept. 16.
[AFP/YONHAP, YTN CAPTURE, REUTERS/YONHAP]

Worst Year: Asia’s climate casualties
For the first time since 2017, the Korean peninsula did not experience a typhoon landfall this summer. Elsewhere, the region was not so lucky, with 2024 seeing the addition of thousands of “climate casualties” across Asia and the Pacific.

Twenty years ago, a devastating Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami on December 26, 2004, killed more than 200,000 in a single day. In contrast, 2024 was a year of mounting casualties from typhoon, floods, heat waves and droughts.

This included Super Typhoon Yagi. One of the strongest storms to hit Southeast Asia in years, Yagi left a path of death and devastation from the Philippines through southern China and Vietnam to Laos, Thailand and Myanmar. The November storm killed hundreds and devastated communities and livelihoods.

Floods from the yearly monsoon rains also left millions displaced and hundreds dead in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Pakistan, India and Nepal, making this year one of the deadliest in recent memory. And, if it was not record-breaking rainfall, it was drought accompanied by scorching temperatures leading to months of severe water shortages.

With extreme weather events seemingly more the norm and their victims too often increasingly unnoticed and forgotten, the region’s climate casualties garner the dubious distinction of having the “worst year” in Asia.

Bad Year: East Asia’s babies
Korea’s aspiring grandparents might well have a critical question. Where are all the babies? First there was the news that in 2023, the sales of dog strollers in Korea for the first time exceeded those of baby carriages for online retailer Gmarket. In 2024, dog strollers reportedly continued to outsell baby prams, a sign of the country’s shrinking birth rate.

Record-low fertility rates continued to prove a major concern not just in Korea but also in China and Japan as well as Taiwan and Hong Kong in 2024. With women having very few to no children, fertility rates remained well below that needed for a stable if not growing population. The long-term economic consequences could well be significant as nations contend with shrinking workforces and aging populations.

Changing gender roles, long work hours, the high cost of housing, education and childcare are all cited as some of the factors behind this East Asia demographic trend. According to Seoul’s Ministry of the Interior and Safety, Korea is also now officially a “super-aged” society, as the proportion of citizens aged 65 or older now accounts for 20 percent of the population.

Mixed Year: democracy & incumbency
From India and Japan to Indonesia, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Taiwan, elections were very much on the 2024 calendar across the region. At year’s end, however, it has proven a decidedly mixed year for not just incumbent politicians but for democracy itself.

The year began with longtime leader and Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasani winning reelection overwhelmingly in an election boycotted by the opposition. She resigned and fled the country months later after weeks of students protests.

As Koreans know all too well, the year ended with President Yoon Suk Yeol declaring martial law eight months after his party lost big in the general election, only to see the National Assembly successfully move both to force the lifting of martial law and then to impeach him as well as his acting successor. The K-drama continues.

Yet, elections cemented a vibrant democracy in Taiwan, forced India’s president, Narendra Modi, to govern with a coalition, surprised the Pakistan incumbent and heralded the peaceful transition of presidential power in Indonesia to former General Prabowo Subianto. Diverse, mixed democratic trajectories for a diversity of democracies in Asia characterized 2024.

Good Year: the Korean wave
Some good news, though, for Korea in 2024. “K” is for Korean. Whether “K-pop” music, “K-dramas,” “K-beauty” products, or Korean fried chicken and other “K-food,” much of the region and world continued to embrace “Hallyu,” the country’s wave of wildly popular cultural exports. 2024 proved a good for this expanding wave of business that has grown well beyond superstar musical groups BTS and Blackpink.

In a recent count, more than 300 Korean movies and series are available for streaming on Netflix alone, including “Squid Game” Season 2 and contract marriage melodrama “When the Phone Rings.” The romantic drama “Queen of Tears” starring Kim Soo-hyun and Kim Ji-won was a 2024 global sensation, clocking more than 690 million viewing hours on Netflix. And the world was dramatically introduced to K-literature, with Korean author Han Kang in 2024 becoming the first Korean and first Asian woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.

This tsunami of soft diplomacy that has elevated Korea’s global presence is also big business. The global economic benefit of “Hallyu” to Korea is now projected to hit $198 billion by 2030, according to a BusinessKorea report in a white paper released this July by TikTok and market research firm Kantar.

Best Year: Moo Deng, Thai viral sensation
To say that a female baby pygmy hippopotamus named Moo Deng — Thai for “bouncy pork” — took the world and 2024 by storm, would be an understatement. Born this July at Thailand’s Khao Chew Open Zoo, the “hyper-viral” baby pygmy has seen memes, photos and videos of her go global.

Fan accounts on X, TikTok and Facebook continue to proliferate. And even NBC’s long-running U.S. comedy show Saturday Night Live got in on the “Moo Deng mania.” Asian American star Bowen Yang impersonated the baby hippo on the show’s “Weekend Update” segment, lamenting the hazards of instant fame. But Moo Deng isn’t just another pretty face. She correctly predicted the winner of the 2024 U.S. presidential race by selecting the fruit and vegetable plate bearing Trump’s name over that of rival Kamala Harris.

2024 might have been the Year of the Dragon, but it also was clearly the year of the hippo in the hearts and minds of Moo Deng fans in Asia and beyond. For bringing a bit of hope and joy to a region and world that could use a lot more reasons for good cheer, the designation of “Best Year in Asia” for 2024 goes to Moo Deng.

Here’s to a hopeful and joy-filled 2025 for Korea and all our world.