- The 17th Annual Meeting of the New Champions (AMNC), also known as Summer Davos, took place this week in Dalian, China.
- China's Premier Li Qiang opened the plenary, proclaiming that what's been called 'China Shock 2.0' should be reframed as 'China Opportunity 2.0.'
- Here's a round up of the best insights on China from Summer Davos.
Every Summer Davos, however much it pretends to be about something else, is, to a significant degree, ultimately about China.
This week, the 17th Annual Meeting of the New Champions , held in Dalian under the slogan Innovating at Scale, was no exception. The theme, as it so often is, was a matter of enterprise: the leap from lab bench to assembly line, the good idea multiplied across a continent and turned into a flourishing business.
But in Dalian, 'scale' kept sliding from a verb into a description of the host country itself. China is where scale is the fundamental condition, not just an aspiration and almost every session, whatever its nominal subject, found its way back to that fact.
It is also a word that carries its own ambivalence, which is part of why it kept surfacing. Scale is what brings the world to Dalian, but also what unsettles it. It's the source of the opportunity and the unease, of the cheaper battery and the lower-cost token.
China's Premier Li Qiang opened the plenary, proclaiming that what's been called 'China Shock 2.0' should be reframed as 'China Opportunity 2.0.'
Prosperity amid a redrawn map
The World Economic Forum had organized the week around five questions. The first - how can we find prosperity amid shifting trade and industrial realities? - was the one the data spoke to most plainly.
The World Trade Organization now expects trade in goods to grow 1.9% this year, down from 4.6%, with a further slide toward 1.4% should oil prices stay high. The 'Resisting Autarky' session took up the question of how open economies should respond to this. Yuen Yuen Ang, the Alfred Chandler Chair Professor of Political Economy at Johns Hopkins University, argued that half-measures tend to be the costliest course, delivering neither the gains of openness nor the security that protection is meant to buy. The instruments of trade restriction, she suggested, are in any case "a big-power luxury" available to very few and the more durable lesson comes from smaller open economies that have learned to "protect people, not markets." Export controls, she noted, can also accelerate indigenous innovation among those they target.
Other participants tended toward the practical. Professor Yu Miaojie, President of Liaoning University, described a trading system reorganizing itself into "Three Kingdoms" around the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), Asia-Pacific's Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) and the European Union (EU), while the Founder of Chinese consumer electronics giant TCL, Li Dongsheng, spoke of building "multiple replicas of TCL around the world," keeping production close to customers as barriers rise.
An economy in three minds
The harder question is where the Chinese economy goes from here.
If you were to paint a picture of it, it would have to be a triptych and Shen Jianguang, Chief Economist, Vice President and Director of the e-commerce platform JD.com, sketched its three panels: an AI-and-clean-energy sector growing at double digits beside a property sector falling at the same rate; a strong supply side beside a weak demand side; and booming exports beside flat consumption. This is the economy China's new 15th Five-Year Plan is built for, with its talk of "new quality productive forces" and its bet on advanced manufacturing, and it is also the economy whose imbalance everyone was too polite to dwell on and too honest to ignore.
Trade Wars are Class Wars co-author Matthew Klein, in the A World Out of Balance session, put it rather more bluntly, arguing that what the West calls overcapacity "could just as easily be expressed as underconsumption." Huang Yiping, Boya Distinguished Professor at Peking University, conceded the point and raised it, noting that rebalancing is real - the current-account surplus has fallen from 10% of GDP to under 4% - but nowhere near sufficient and floating a "Global South Green Development Plan" to send the surplus somewhere useful. The most quotable reassurance came from Fang Xinghai, who reminded a panel on financial fragmentation that the United States, the one country with the power to fracture the system, "has a huge need for a stable international financial system to finance its deficit. So don't worry so much."
Putting it to work
The question of how technology actually reaches the real economy is one China has answered more convincingly than most and it answered it again here the way it knows best: less by inventing the technology - from zero to one - than by scaling it and putting it to use. Where the loudest race is toward artificial general intelligence, Yasushi Sasaki, Managing Director and Senior Partner at BCG, observed, a quieter effort runs through "AI Plus," the application-first approach that Beijing has also made national policy. China has focused on the unglamorous work of diffusion, of getting existing models into clinics and onto factory floors.
Xue Lan, Dean, Schwarzman College at Tsinghua University, pressed the same point, arguing that there are three stories to tell about AI and that the world keeps telling only the first; the neglected one is how slowly the technology actually diffuses, which is where much of the value will be found. Ya-Qin Zhang, Founding Dean of the Institute for AI Industry Research at Tsinghua University, who previously held a senior position at the Chinese search giant Baidu, located the advantage in "scale, efficiency, and integration," and made the connection few others did: that a long-planned smart grid and cheap green power are "why China can produce very low-cost, high-quality tokens." Energy, in this view, is AI policy. The applications were not hard to find, from Ni Jun, Chief Manufacturing Officer of battery powerhouse CATL, who described 40 million idle EVs reimagined as distributed 'token factories", to Jay Lee, Clark Distinguished Chair Director of Industrial Artificial Intelligence Center at the University of Maryland, who studies industrial AI, insisting that advanced manufacturing has to be "high tech and high pay" or no one will staff it. The caution came from the World Economic Forum's own Chief Economists' Outlook , which has quietly pushed the expected productivity payoff from AI out to three years and beyond.
Work for the young
The question of whether growth would make room for the next generation drew the least sustained attention of the week - a silence Bloomberg's Opinion Columnist, Karishma Vaswani broke at the close of the APEC session, naming youth employment the elephant in the room the programme had circled but never landed on.
The IMF's estimate that some 40% of jobs worldwide are in some way exposed to AI hung over the meeting largely unchallenged. Jonas Prising, Chair and CEO of ManpowerGroup, offered the consoling reading that AI augments more than it replaces and that the recent rise in youth unemployment looks cyclical, rather than structural; "the future of work," he said, "depends on the workers of the future."
The less consoled voice came from the floor, a young Global Shaper from Jamaica who observed that for her generation, inflation registers less in prices than in the things her peers no longer do: they have "stopped having children, stopped buying homes." In China the question is as much about demography as technology, surfacing sidelong: in the silver-economy optimism of the Ageing as an Asset panel, which cast a greying population as a market, rather than a burden, and in the retraining of workforces for jobs that barely existed a decade ago. Haier CTO, Xie Haiqin, described reskilling the workers at a "lighthouse" factory in Chongqing as the line filled with automation, the kind of plant the World Economic Forum holds up as a model of advanced manufacturing.
Power first
On no question did China speak with less hesitation than energy and for good reason: the scale here is already built and the cost curve already bends its way. The framing was blunt: No power, no AI.
The International Energy Agency projects that data centres will roughly double their electricity draw by 2030 and that China and the United States together will account for some 80% of the growth. CATL's Founder, Robin Zeng, asked what single thing he would tell governments, offered the week's most quietly pointed line: "Less geopolitical calculation, more cooperation will bring a better future for all."
The economic case came from Li Bo, Deputy Managing Director of the IMF who argued that renewables now make sense on price alone, China having driven the cost of solar and storage down far enough that the rest of the world needs only attend to demand. The numbers behind the claim were striking. LONGi's Chair Zhong Baoshen reckoned China had saved some $110 billion in 2025 by burning less imported oil and gas and the China's Climate Envoy, Liu Zhenmin, held that its diversified energy mix had left it "more resilient than all the rest of the Asian countries" through the Hormuz disruption.
Both at once
Perhaps the week's most useful framing came on the panel convened to unpack the Five-Year Plan, where John Hopkin's University's Yuen Yuen Ang treated the whole China question as one connected mechanism, rather than a quarrel with two sides.
China can now make almost anything at scale and at a price no one can match. Whether that arrives in the world as a shock or as an opportunity turns on a single variable: China's ability to generate sufficient domestic demand to absorb much more of what its factories produce. Kept in, the surplus is China's to manage; pushed out, it becomes everyone's. "To use the words of Premier Li," she noted, "the 'shock' can become an 'opportunity,'" reaching the host's own phrase from the opposite direction.
Beside her, Columbia University Historian Adam Tooze made the case for sorting, rather than lumping, since not every Chinese export carries the same weight. Cheap solar and batteries he could read only as a net gain, an industry that puts power into sub-Saharan villages that never had it; AI sits at the far pole, contested and freighted with national-security stakes; in between lies the hard country of cars and heavy industry, where the grown-up response is a negotiation over terms. Germany, he reminded the room, spent decades accused of the same swamping - of inflicting on the world goods "so good and so affordable that people kept buying them, and oh, what a problem!" An absurd complaint then, he noted, and not a better one now.
If the week had a common thread, it was that these strains are best taken up at home, rather than exported or argued away: the scale that unsettles the world is the same scale that, turned toward a deeper home market and the jobs to sustain it, makes the shock into the opportunity the host kept describing. Whether it can be done is the real wager of the plan's five years.
