Primarily driven by the COVID-19 pandemic and its far-reaching impacts, China’s gold demand in 2020 declined by 27% compared to 2019, the lowest in a decade. One of the side effects from such weakness was the widest Shanghai-London spot gold price discount in history. Averaging -US$24/oz in 2020, the local Chinese gold price spread remained far below its 10-year average between 2010 and 2019.