One year on after Chinese President Xi Jinping made a historic speech defending globalization in Davos last year, US President Donald Trump will soon join more than 3,000 politicians, business elites and opinion leaders from around the world on the World Economic Forum, with the theme of “Creating a Shared Future in a Fractured World."

Sebastian Buckup, the Head of Programming and Member of the Executive Committee at WEF, said possible difference on globalization makes platforms like the WEF even more important.

“Indeed we have moved out, gladly so, of a time when the west is in a position to lecture other countries if I might say so. One of the thematic pillars of the meeting this year is the multi-conceptual model. It’s not just about more even distribution or more widely distributed power, we also have different concepts of global governance, that’s why platforms like the World Economic Forum are so important because that requires even more interaction communication to find common ground and common interest,” said Buckup. 

This year, Liu He, who was elected as a member of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China Central Committee in October, will head a delegation at the forum and is expected to shed light on the trends of China's economy.

Liu Baocheng, the dean of the Center for International Business Ethics from the University of International Business and Economics, hopes the presence of Donald Trump in Davos is not only there to propagate America-firstism but at least spare one ear to listen what other people are talking about. 

“The Chinese participation shows that it is really a multipolar world, it’s the diversity that we are there to respect them, we are really driving this diversity and respect this diversity, by providing more public goods to the world and China does really present although China is not really boasting that how a developing economy can really lift a large number of population out of extreme poverty and how a pluralism can really work instead of a singular type of approach,” said Liu.