As the whole world grapples with lockdowns, closures and cancelled events – and the milestones of the design industry’s busy calendar of trade shows disappears, we might look to one country for lessons on how to cope: China. The first to face the covid-19 crisis, and one of the first to begin emerging from it, we get the perspective from two major design industry shows on how 2020 might change their operations for good, and how they’ve tried to maintain value and purpose in the face of such an existential disruption. We speak with Aroma Xie, co-founder of Ontimeshow in Shanghai, which has become one of China’s biggest fashion trade shows, and Zhuo Tan, the Event Director at Design Shangai, one of the most important design and architecture trade shows in Asia.