In January 2017, shortly after President Donald Trump’s first inauguration, Chinese President Xi Jinping addressed the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos. He presented his country as a defender of globalization, free trade, and the international order. The speech was a sensation.
An audience still unsettled by Trump’s first election greeted Xi’s remarks with enthusiasm. Media outlets around the world highlighted his warning that protectionism was like “locking oneself in a dark room without fresh air or sunlight.”
Many commentators noted the irony of a one-party communist state presenting itself as the champion of free trade against the US, but irony carried little weight in Davos at the time. Trump was then as unpopular in Europe as he is now, and Beijing appeared — at least from the vantage point of the Swiss Alps — as a plausible alternative steward of the international order.
Klaus Schwab, founder of the WEF, lavished praise on Xi, declaring that the speech had “charted a course for the global economy” and brought “Chinese wisdom and experience” to Davos.
Beijing was quick to build on this goodwill. Xi told a closed-door meeting of China’s Central State Security Commission the same month that it should assume “dual leadership” of a “more just and rational new world order” and a “new international security architecture.”
The State Security Commission, created in 2014 shortly after Xi consolidated power, reflects his governing instincts and emphasizes comprehensive political and social control. This is enforced through the Ministry of State Security (MSS), China’s sprawling intelligence and internal security apparatus.
The MSS resembles the KGB or East Germany’s Stasi, but with far greater technological reach and institutional capacity. Under Xi’s so-called “New Era,” this focus on security and control has steadily narrowed the space for Chinese citizens.
If any society had locked itself into a dark room without light or fresh air, it was Xi’s China, rather than the US during Trump’s first term.
The idea of “dual leadership” soon faded from official Chinese rhetoric, likely because it was deemed too provocative for external audiences. It was replaced by vaguer formulations, including a series of Chinese “Global Initiatives,” with one focused on “global security.”
The language may have softened, but the ambition remained — and expanded. And any hopes Davos elites may have harbored in 2017 about China as a defender of free trade soon looked grotesquely naïve.
Since the 1990s, Beijing’s trade and industrial policy has been built on a mercantilist model: maximizing exports and domestic production through heavy state intervention while suppressing imports and domestic consumption. Such an approach does not promote free trade; it slowly throttles it.
That contradiction was impossible to ignore during the Covid-19 pandemic and is now evident in China’s massive industrial overcapacity and chronic supply and demand imbalances. Enthusiasm for Beijing as a guarantor of free trade in Davos and elsewhere quickly cooled.
Nearly a decade later, history may not be repeating itself, but it certainly rhymes. Davos found a new hero to offset the shock of Trump. This time, the standing ovation was for Mark Carney, the Canadian prime minister and former Bank of England governor.
In his address, Carney warned that the international order was coming apart and called on small states and middle powers to work together against the arrogance of great powers. Donald Trump, correctly inferring that he was the target, responded with characteristic bluster.
Carney’s call for collective action by smaller states against predatory great powers is, in principle, persuasive. In a world where rules are weakening, Europe in particular cannot rely on soft power alone. Greater internal cohesion and credible hard power matter too — a point driven home at Davos by Alexander Stubb, the Finnish president and sometime Trump golfing partner.
As with Xi Jinping’s speech in 2017, however, Carney’s address — polished and articulate as it was — would have rung truer if it had been matched by actual policy.
Carney has done little to counter great-power arrogance by building a common front of smaller states. Instead, he has leaned toward one great power against another — and, by choosing China, toward the consistently more problematic of the two.
Just a week before his appearance in Davos, Carney traveled to Beijing with considerable fanfare. On January 16, he announced a “strategic partnership” with China and spoke of opening a “new era” in bilateral relations.
Those relations had previously been strained by China’s arbitrary detention of two Canadian citizens, in retaliation for Canada’s arrest of Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou, as well as by revelations of extensive Chinese interference in Canadian democratic processes.
In Beijing, Carney spoke approvingly of a “new world order,” implicitly grounded in closer cooperation with China. He also signaled plans to dramatically slash tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles — from 100% to 6% — although the heavily subsidized Chinese cars would be barred from crossing the border into the US, which absorbs roughly three-quarters of Canada’s exports.
Despite his rhetoric about standing up to predatory great powers, Carney did not use his trip to Beijing to voice support for Southeast Asian states facing Chinese territorial claims in the South China Sea, which have been ruled illegal under international law.
Nor did he raise concerns about human rights abuses in Tibet, Xinjiang, or Hong Kong, let alone the fate of the Canadian citizens previously held hostage by Beijing.
In Davos, Carney opened his speech with a quotation from The Power of the Powerless, by the Czech resistance hero and President Václav Havel. Havel’s work continues to resonate for good reason, but the context suggested a deep misunderstanding of its central arguments.
Carney’s decision to equate the systematic repression of communist Czechoslovakia after 1968 with the West’s postwar liberal order was simply bizarre. And invoking Havel a week after accommodating a regime built on repression, coercion, and systematic untruth was hard to reconcile with the very idea of “living in truth.”
It instead echoed the condition of “living a lie,” which Havel set out to describe.
Like Xi Jinping’s appearance in Davos in 2017, Carney’s speech in 2026 ultimately stood out less for its undeniable eloquence than for the distance between words and reality. We will see how long the enthusiasm lasts among the Davos elites this time.
Martin Hála (Ph.D.) is a sinologist currently based in Prague. Educated in Prague, Shanghai, Berkeley, and at Harvard, he has taught at universities in Prague and Bratislava, and conducted research in China, Taiwan, and the U.S. He has worked for several media-assistance organizations in Europe and Asia, and from 2014-2015 served as the Asia Pacific regional manager at the Open Society Foundations. At present, he is the Director of the new nonprofit Sinopsis.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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