China's summer forum returns to the coast
The World Economic Forum’s summer meeting opened on 23 June in Dalian, bringing global business and political leaders to a port city on China’s northeast coast. The conversation is about growth, energy and open trade, and the phrase on everyone’s lips is China opportunity.
On 23 June, the World Economic Forum’s annual summer meeting opened in Dalian, the port city on China’s northeast coast that has, for nearly two decades, hosted this particular gathering of global business chiefs, officials and scholars. The meeting runs through 25 June, and the agenda is the familiar one: economic recovery, the energy transition, artificial intelligence, and whether the world can keep trading openly. By the second day, the phrase that recurred in every corridor was the same one the host country most wanted to hear.
That phrase is China opportunity. After a stretch in which foreign business leaders came to China with questions about confidence, about supply-chain reshoring and about the policy direction, the talk in Dalian this year has leaned the other way. Delegates have been making the case, in public remarks and in panels, that China remains an engine for global growth, that its commitment to openness is intact, and that innovation, particularly in green technology and in advanced manufacturing, is where the next decade’s returns will be found. It is a message the forum’s Chinese hosts have been keen to amplify.
The setting matters. Dalian, on the Yellow Sea, is a city built on shipping and heavy industry, and it is an unlikely backdrop for a conference whose mood is about services and software. But that contrast is part of the point: the forum is staged in a working industrial port rather than a financial capital, which suits the conversation about how an economy retools. The energy transition and the future of manufacturing are not abstract here; they are the trucks in the harbour and the ships being built down the coast.
The harder questions, inevitably, sit underneath the upbeat ones. Business leaders want to know whether the opening of the Chinese market is real and durable, how far foreign firms will be treated on equal terms, and what the regulatory environment for new technology will look like as the year wears on. The forum is not where those questions get answered; it is where they are asked in public, and where the official answers are delivered in speeches that carry more weight because they are given on home soil.
The global backdrop is not friendly. Growth across much of the industrialized world is sluggish, the energy shock from the Middle East is still working its way through prices, and trade politics in Washington and Brussels are unpredictable. In that environment, a gathering that repeats the case for openness is doing work that goes beyond the photo opportunities. Whether the optimism survives contact with the data over the rest of the year is a separate question.
What the three days in Dalian establish is that the world’s business establishment still wants a seat at the table in China, and that Beijing still wants them there. The forum is, in that sense, a barometer rather than a decision. The readings this year are warmer than they have been, and the host city, on the coast, is listening.