NYT - And The Davos Band Plays On
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On Tuesday, it was President Xi Jinping, the first Chinese leader to attend the Davos meeting, who addressed the American and British retreats directly. “The problems troubling the world are not caused by globalization,” Mr. Xi told the forum. As for climate change, he urged that “signatories should stick to” the Paris climate agreement. Though he never mentioned Mr. Trump by name, the target of his remarks was clear. “As the Chinese saying goes,” he said, “people with petty shrewdness attend to trivial matters, while people with vision attend to governance of institutions.” Ouch.
Mr. Xi’s remarks should serve as a sobering warning about the stakes of walking away from the grand visions that have guided American foreign policy since the end of World War II. But they also reflect the reality that emerging economies — China is still a developing country — across Asia and Africa are counting on hitching their economic engines to a fairly brokered global economy, and that they will face the worst effects of climate change.
Global inequality has grown to the point that just eight of the planet’s richest people now hold wealth equal to that of the poorest half of the world population. Bill Gates, the richest man in the world, with a personal net worth of over $84 billion, is attending this year’s Davos meeting, where sessions on inequality underscore the worries about populist revolt. Also on the agenda is a preoccupation from last year that automation will soon put millions of people out of work.
But for Davos to be more than a punch line about the wealthy, it will have to address the pains of globalization head on and do better than its usual platitudes about building “a dynamic, inclusive multi-stakeholder global-governance system.”
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https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/18/opinion/an-odd-moment-for-davos.html
