Guest editorial - Special Issue : The impact of COVID-19 on education, work and governance in China and Asia

The world was shocked by the sudden outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. As the world faces an unprecedented global health crisis after the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, many countries across the global village have encountered tremendous political, health, financial, economic, and educational challenges. The Covid-19 pandemic which emerged in Wuhan, the People’s Republic of China brought panic to the world in terms of its ramifications and spread. At the beginning, major world leaders in the West had not realized how severe of the Covid-19 pandemic, hence many governments in Europe and North America did not take such a health crisis very seriously by introducing health preventive measures effective enough in combating this global disease. Tougher public health measures have begun to be adopted by leaders in the Western societies only when the crisis has gone beyond national control. In contrast, most of the leaders in East Asia have adopted relatively stringent public health policies to manage the Covid-19 because of their previous painstaking experiences when handling the widespread of SARs in the 2003.