Among the self-enclosed circles of the rich and powerful in Davos, saying the right things often matters more than getting things right.
Just think back to January 2017, shortly after Donald Trump’s first inauguration, when Chinese Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping addressed the World Economic Forum in Davos. Speaking in his secondary role as president of the People’s Republic of China, Xi presented China as a defender of globalization, free trade, and the international order. The speech was a sensation. An audience still unsettled by Trump’s 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 United States. But irony carried little weight in Davos at the time. Trump was then as unpopular in Europe as he is now, and China 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 World Economic Forum, lavished praise on Xi, declaring that his speech had “charted a course for the global economy” and brought “Chinese wisdom and experience” to Davos.
Dual Leadership
Beijing was quick to build on this goodwill. Later that same month, Xi told a closed-door meeting of China’s Central State Security Commission that China should assume what he called “dual leadership” (liang ge yindao): leadership of a “more just and rational new world order” and of a “new international security architecture.”
The State Security Commission, created in 2014 shortly after Xi consolidated power, reflects his governing instincts. It embodies an emphasis on comprehensive political and social control, enforced primarily through the Ministry of State Security (MSS) — China’s sprawling intelligence and internal security apparatus. In historical terms, 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 has locked itself into a dark room without light or fresh air, it is Xi’s China, rather than the United States under 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,” one of which focuses on “global security.” The language softened, but the ambition remained — and expanded.
Killing the free trade softly
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 thoroughly mercantilist model: maximizing exports and domestic production through heavy state intervention while suppressing imports and domestic consumption. Such approach does not promote free trade; it slowly kills it.
That contradiction became impossible to ignore during the COVID-19 pandemic and is now evident in China’s massive industrial overcapacity and chronic supply–demand imbalances, both at home and abroad. Enthusiasm for Beijing as a guarantor of free trade in Davos and elsewhere quickly cooled.
The Arrogance of Great Powers
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 Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney.
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 implied 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 in Davos by Finnish President Alexander Stubb, among others.
The Hypocrisy of Davos
As with Xi Jinping’s speech in 2017, however, Carney’s address — polished and articulate as it was — would have rung more true had it been matched by actual policy. In his actions, Carney has not tried to counter great-power arrogance by building a common front of smaller states. Instead, he has leaned toward one great power against another — and toward the consistently more problematic of the two.
Just a week before his appearance in Davos, Carney traveled to Beijing with considerable fanfare. There, 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 Chinese interference in Canadian democratic processes.
One Message for Beijing, Another for Davos
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 percent to 6 — opening the Canadian market to heavily subsidized Chinese cars that would nonetheless be barred from crossing the border into the United States, which absorbs roughly three-quarters of Canada’s exports. It is difficult to see how such a “new world order” would work in practice.
Despite his rhetoric in Davos about standing up to predatory great powers, Carney did not, in Beijing, voice support for Southeast Asian states facing Chinese territorial claims in the South China Sea, ruled illegal under international law by a 2016 arbitral tribunal. 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.
Living a lie
In Davos, Carney opened his speech with a quotation from Václav Havel’s The Power of the Powerless. Havel’s work continues to resonate for good reason. But the context suggested a deep misunderstanding of what Havel was arguing.
Equating the systematic repression of communist Czechoslovakia after 1968 with the postwar liberal order in the West is simply bizarre. Invoking Havel a week after accommodating a regime built on repression, coercion, and systematic untruth is hard to reconcile with the very idea of “living in truth.” It instead echoes the condition of “living a lie” that 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 in Davos this time.