If you asked which year was worst for air travel, almost anywhere in the world the answer is 2020. In China the answer is 2022, and the gap between the two is large enough that it changes how the whole period reads.
The year-by-year series for Chinese carriers runs like this. Traffic peaked at 659.6 million passengers in 2019. It fell 36.7% to 417.3 million in 2020, which is a severe drop but a good deal shallower than the 60.2% the world as a whole suffered that year. It then recovered, modestly, to 440.3 million in 2021.
And then it fell again, to 250.8 million in 2022.
The second fall was bigger than the first
That 2022 figure is the one worth pausing on. It is 43% below 2021. It is well below the 2020 low. It is 62.0% under the 2019 peak, and it is the lowest annual total China has recorded since 2009. Chinese aviation in 2022 was operating at a scale it had last seen thirteen years earlier.
What makes it stranger is the contrast with everyone else. 2022 was the year global aviation recovered hardest, adding 950.3 million passengers worldwide. The world was reopening and filling planes again. China was going the other way.
Then it came back almost all at once
2023 reversed it. Chinese carriers flew 619.2 million passengers, an increase of 368.5 million in twelve months. That single year of recovery is larger than the entire annual traffic of every country in the world except the United States and China itself. It left 2023 at 6.1% below the 2019 peak, a shortfall similar to the 4.2% the world overall was still carrying.
The long climb behind it
The disruption is dramatic partly because the twenty years before it were so smooth. Chinese carriers flew 61.9 million passengers in 2000 and 619.2 million in 2023, exactly ten times as many. Before 2020 the series contains no down years at all. Not 2001, not 2003, not the financial crisis. Every single year was larger than the one before it.
That is why the shape of this series is unusual even among aviation markets that grew fast. India grew 943% and Turkey 932% over the same period, both from small bases, and both finished 2023 above their 2019 levels. China grew 900% and finished below. The growth story and the disruption story belong to the same twenty-three years.
One caveat worth stating: this measure counts passengers carried by carriers registered in each country, not passengers passing through its airports. It is the standard international basis, and it is why Ireland, home to Ryanair, appears far larger than its population would suggest.