In China, I searched for Davos Man but found someone else entirely different

We know, and sometimes relish deriding, the archetype “Davos Man”: the global alpha elite who descend on the Swiss Alps every January, their frequency tuned mostly to what the West wants, fears and gripes about.

That impulse was amped up in 2026, especially as US President Donald Trump stole the show with a rare appearance, where hundreds queued to hear him taunt allies and press his case to take Greenland. After all the upheaval of recent years, the Trump obsession endures.

What, then, of “Summer Davos”, the gathering China has hosted with the World Economic Forum since 2007, alternating between Dalian, the host in 2026, and Tianjin? Who is the Dalian Woman, if such a figure can be drawn?

Attending the gathering last week, the composite that formed in my mind was altogether different from the one I hold of Davos Man. The January event, and consequently the people who attend it, I assume, fixate on what is coming and the menace of the moment, be it the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, or the Greenland issue.

This one, by contrast, was fascinating for training its gaze farther out.

The forum agenda made real a thought many of us carry, and which frustrates because it plays out so little in anglophone discourse: that not everything revolves around the US and Trump.

China’s tech prowess, from batteries to robotics, and its draw as a home for “deep tech” that demands high expertise and long lead times before commercialisation, exerted its own gravitational pull.

In panel after panel, one heard about the necessity of having a “10,000-foot view” of looking out for deep tech that might break through within a few years, even if unseen now. Quantum computing, I heard in one instance, sits roughly where artificial intelligence was in 2019: about three years from a breakout.

Indonesian lawmaker Rahayu Saraswati Djojohadikusumo, a repeat Summer Davos attendee, told me the crowd struck her as “self-selecting” – more level-headed about superpower relations, and eager to ride both powers, as her country is.

“I think it’s clear that we, all of us, right now are just focused on how do we survive... and have that stance of non-alignment; it’s not just smart but strategic,” she said. Her views were her own, she added, not those of her paternal uncle, Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto.

Still, they broadly aligned with what I picked up across more than a dozen panels and various side conversations with attendees. There was bullishness about China, yes, but not the glassy-eyed sort the caricature would have you expect. It was most certainly far from the stilted, scripted affair outsiders might imagine of a China-facing conference.

Trumpian chaos was spoken of plainly. Kristen Hopewell, a professor at the University of British Columbia’s School of Public Policy and Global Affairs, suggested on one panel that the US should be expelled from the World Trade Organization (WTO) over its protectionism.

“If you allow the US to remain in the WTO while it’s blatantly violating the rules of the system, you’re undermining the system, and you’re creating (a) licence for other states to mimic that sort of behaviour,” she said.

One wonders whether such a line would have been aired so freely at an event not like this one, or had it been held somewhere ostensibly neutral that, in truth, tilts towards Washington. But here, this sort of talk was par for the course. Moderators played their part too.

At one session, when a speaker leaned on national security to justify a Western country’s trade policies, there was gentle pushback rather than a free pass. The moderator offered an aside that two things can be true at once: National security is a valid concern, but it is increasingly invoked when a country finds itself losing a particular industrial contest.

There was room, too, for speakers to offer Beijing advice on what it could do better, though pitched not as scolding but as counsel in China’s own interest. Economic historian Adam Tooze, for instance, urged China to “repress” its indignation over things such as needing to negotiate with Brussels for favourable market access for its electric vehicles, and to do it anyway, given the net benefit to it.

Geopolitics a second draw

The most refreshing thing, though, was that the superpower rivalry was at best a second draw. It helped that there was no Trump, but also no swaggering Western corporate heavyweights or billionaire tech chieftains selling ebullience or polemics. Perhaps the smaller fish gathered here do not strut as the big whales do in Davos. Even the Chinese speakers, operating on home turf, did not strike me as particularly triumphalist.

Instead, in this “Annual Meeting of the New Champions”, the bigger pull was the talk of technology and research, and not just that of Chinese origin, but work from everywhere. People were less fixated on decoupling than hungry for opportunities across both camps. They spoke of “zero to one”, the making of a discovery, and of “10 to 100” – very early-stage science and tech.

Diana Virgovicova, co-founder of the Toronto-based deep-tech water purification start-up Xatoms, who has also done “Davos Davos”, as the January event gets called, told me she found in Dalian a real appetite among participants to bite down into technical discussion, even among those starting from zero on the subject.

Indeed, I saw this play out at her presentation on the process she pioneered, which applies AI and quantum mechanics to chemical systems to predict the physical and chemical properties of molecules and materials.

On top of people with no technical grounding gamely and curiously engaging, it opened into a wider discussion on why so many outside the field assume that quantum-associated applications must wait for the mainstream arrival of quantum computers. The reality is that in fields like hers, and in quantum sensing and communication, the advances are already here.

Virgovicova said, as other first-time attendees did to me, that seeing was believing: Only in Dalian did she grasp how advanced and entrenched China’s deep-tech base had become.

So who is the Summer Davos attendee? I would say it is someone who wants to look ahead, who accepts today’s geopolitical frictions, for which China is also culpable, but keeps them in perspective.

The new-age elite who converge here are at their core curious about the science and technology that will underpin the future economy. Theirs is a superpower-agnostic frequency: cautiously upbeat, clear-eyed about the chaos, but still game for what comes next.