THE HOME STRAIGHT

On 17 January 2017, days before Donald Trump would stride into the White House, Xi Jinping rose to the Davos lectern to address a dejected audience of global business leaders at the annual gathering of the World Economic Forum. Globalization would continue, Xi argued determinedly, if not under US stewardship then under that of his own. “The global economy is the big ocean that you cannot escape from”, China's strongman said, picking his words carefully. “Any attempt to cut off the flow of capital, technologies, products, industries and people between economies, and channel the waters in the ocean back into isolated lakes and creeks is simply not possible.”

The conference hall packed with the great and the good of global capitalism found itself in violent agreement with the Marxist leader. And when he had finished, it broke into applause worthy of a Communist Party clapping frenzy.

Xi was no liberal, but globalization had powered China's rise for 40 years, and its demise would spell disaster. For Trump, globalization seemed a dead end, but for Xi it was the path to regaining China's strength. Smashing the world's architecture would be destructive. What was needed was a new global order, one that would supplant the old structures of the West. There was much to be said for Trump's new politics of strength. But he needed to make sure this brand of politics did not spell the end of globalization.

It turned Xi into the unlikeliest of Davos's heroes. Since his elevation to general secretary in 2012, he had only acted in the best of strongmen traditions, solidifying his personal hold on power by jailing rivals under the guise of anti-corruption campaigns. He had unleashed a brutal policy of cultural assimilation on China's Uighur population in the western province of Xinjiang.