BY TYLER DURDEN
Speaking virtually on the first day of Davos’ World Economic Forum on Monday, Chinese President Xi Jinping gave his first major public address since Joe Biden entered the White House, tailoring his message toward calming tensions among global rivals and urging a return to “mutual respond” but also emphasizing Beijing is ready to forge its own path regardless.
Underscoring that nations must “abandon ideological prejudice” and immediately abandon a dangerous “Cold-War mentality” he called on world powers to “stay committed to international law and international rules instead of staying committed to supremacy.”
“Difference in itself is no cause for alarm, what does bring alarm is arrogance, prejudice and hatred,” Xi told the Davos Agenda event, following four years of the Trump administration’s anti-China policies which brought Sino-US relations to their lowest point in decades. “Confrontation will lead us to a dead end.” It should be noted that there’s previously little doubt that Davos attendees pretty much despised Trump, and now this year Xi of China’s Communist Party is opening the Davos agenda.
“To build small circles and start a new Cold War, to reject, threaten or intimate others, to willfully impose decoupling, supply disruptions, or sanctions, or to create isolation or estrangement, will only push the world into division and even confrontation,” he said.
Recall this is similar language to his “warnings” of rising anti-globalization and protectionism during his prior 2017 Davos speech, where he said, “Pursuing protectionism is like locking oneself in a dark room. While wind and rain may be kept outside, that dark room will also block light and air. No one will emerge as a winner in a trade war.”
Except now the world has been ravaged by the continuing slow burn of the global pandemic, which originated in Wuhan, China last year—making the Davos Agenda 2021 a dubiously hoped-for ‘great reset’ year, as Rabobank quips sarcastically:
Today kicks off the annual World Economic Forum, which this time round is online and so can’t charge anyone $43 for a hotdog. Expect various iterations along the theme of “Builders’ Bums Better” from the talking heads as the ‘Great Reset’ slash ‘Great Reflation’ is dangled before markets.