In 2022, in our annual look at Asia’s “winners and losers”, we took to CNBC and put the spotlight on Southeast Asia’s “comeback kids”, for their overcoming scepticism, family history and backroom intrigue and winning elections to lead their respective nations, we named Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos, Jr., and Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim, as winners of “Best year in Asia 2022”. 

For China’s Xi Jinping, 2018 might well have been a year that could not end soon enough. So too was the case in Japan and Indonesia, where thousands saw livelihoods, if not lives, taken by floods, mudslides, earthquakes or tsunamis.