Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen was named by Bloomberg as one of the 50 people “who defined an unprecedented year.”

Calling Tsai “Taiwan’s Covid Crusher,” the New York-based financial news and data provider praised her early action to stem the pandemic. Even as she prepared to fight a January election, Tsai was getting ready to shut borders, impose travel restrictions and was setting up rigorous contact-tracing and quarantine procedures.

This led to Taiwan’s record of more than 200 days with no local COVID-19 cases. The self-ruled island of 23 million people has recorded only 600 coronavirus cases and seven deaths.

Taiwan will likely be one of the few economies to expand in 2020, with the government in August forecasting 1.56% GDP growth, Bloomberg said.

But Tsai needs to remain vigilant, it warned. Taiwan has had more than 20 imported COVID-19 cases in a two-week period, echoing the experience of other countries that had early success fighting the pandemic but were later hit by spikes, such as Singapore and Japan.

Several mainland Chinese also featured in Bloomberg’s list, including Wang Xing, chair of tech giant Meituan, Contemporary Amperex Technology chair Zeng Yuqun, who made a deal to supply batteries to Tesla, Chinese military vaccine researcher Chen Wei, as well as live-streamer marketer Viya.

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