Summer Davos in Dalian: US-China Rivalry and the Thucydides Trap Take Centre Stage at WEF's Annual Meeting of the New Champions
The northeastern Chinese port city of Dalian is hosting the World Economic Forum's 17th Annual Meeting of the New Champions — popularly known as Summer Davos — from June 23 to 25, under the theme "Innovating at Scale." According to the WEF, more than 1,700 leaders from business, government, science and fast-growing companies across over 90 countries have gathered, with a programme organised around five questions: how to find prosperity amid shifting trade and industrial realities, how to understand the next phase of China's economic trajectory, how technology can be harnessed for real-economy outcomes, how growth can create jobs for the next generation, and how the energy transition can become a source of competitiveness. The backdrop is anything but serene. Around 11 percent of world trade has been hit by tariff actions taken since the start of 2025, and the WTO expects trade in goods to grow just 1.9 percent in 2026, down from 4.6 percent in 2025, according to the WEF's own pre-summit briefing materials.
The meeting's most striking political moment came on the sidelines, where Graham Allison, professor at Harvard Kennedy School and a frequent unofficial interlocutor between Chinese and American foreign policymakers, told AFP that a potential war between the two great powers "is very much on the table." Allison, who coined the term "Thucydides trap" — the dangerous dynamic that occurs when a rapidly rising power challenges a dominant ruling one — warned that business-as-usual diplomacy in such circumstances historically produces war. He noted, however, that recent high-level engagement between Presidents Xi Jinping and Donald Trump offers grounds for cautious optimism. At a summit in Beijing last month, Xi reportedly asked Trump whether the two countries could transcend the Thucydides Trap and forge a new paradigm for major-power relations — a remark Allison called deliberate and significant.
The political undertow at Dalian is particularly charged given the timing. War in the Middle East has unsettled energy markets and clouded the global growth outlook, with the International Monetary Fund cautioning that its forecast will depend on the conflict's "duration and scale," according to the WEF's preview. AFP reported from the conference floor that while artificial intelligence is touted as a driver of economic growth, headwinds include growing fears over job losses and deepening geopolitical tensions. WEF Managing Director Mirek Dusek told AFP that AI "is really changing industry and the economy" and that the main imperative for decision-makers is ensuring technological advancement "counts in the real economy." He also warned of "a risk of a backlash against some of these technologies" as security concerns and labour market disruption mount.
China is using the Dalian summit to project an image of openness and multilateral reliability at a moment when its relationship with the United States remains deeply fraught. As the Global Times reported, China announced 15 practical measures on the opening day to further ease foreign investment access and improve its business environment. The WEF noted that "the evolution of China's innovation model will influence growth across Asia and beyond." Yet Allison's assessment of Trump was characteristically frank: the US president is "erratic in his own way," and Xi's decision last year to throttle American access to critical rare-earth minerals in response to sky-high tariffs made Trump realise he was dealing with a genuine peer rival, Allison said. The contest between competing visions — Chinese multilateralism versus American transactionalism — dominated the conference's political sessions.
As Summer Davos closes on June 25, it will leave behind a set of unresolved tensions that no amount of panel optimism can paper over. The WTO's projection of near-stagnant goods trade, the unresolved Strait of Hormuz situation affecting energy markets, and the looming spectre of a US-China technological decoupling all intersect at Dalian in ways that make the forum's theme of scaling innovation feel simultaneously urgent and politically imperilled. Allison's warning about the Thucydides Trap will likely outlast the conference communiqués. Whether the Xi-Trump engagement can be sustained into a genuine structural accommodation — rather than another transactional détente that frays under the weight of domestic politics and competing strategic interests — may be the defining question of the remainder of 2026.