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China’s President Xi attended the World Economic Forum in Davos this Tuesday. And he is the first Chinese president to join this forum.

President Xi Jinping takes the podium on the first day of the World Economic Forum.

Davos, Switzerland, Jan 17，2017

[Photo/Agencies]

As mentioned in Business Insider:

Three days before Donald Trump is set to be inaugurated as the 45th US president, a world power with which he has taken an at-times adversarial approach has become the unlikely leader at the world's most visible gathering of economic elites.

During his address to the annual meeting of political and business leaders, Xi said openness is the primary solution to the global economic slowdown.

"No one will emerge as a winner in a trade war," he said.

Xi established himself as an unlikely defender of the trade-based global order that Trump and others have dismissed on the way to electoral victories. He addressed a crowd full of business leaders and politicians, but his message was squarely aimed at one person: Trump, who on the campaign trail excoriated China's trade policies and threatened to slap a tariff as high as 45% on Chinese imports.

During his campaign, Trump promised to raise tariffs on Chinese goods and declare Beijing guilty of keeping its currency artificially low. That would be a first step toward imposing sanctions. But in fact, for the past couple of years China has been intervening in markets to prop up its currency, not push it lower.

In an unusual turn of events, Xi's speech drew a sharp rebuke to an incoming American administration that has advocated protectionist trade policies and discussed withdrawing from global climate-change agreements. "There's no point in blaming economic globalization for the world's problems," Xi said.

He called for a "new growth model" that takes into account climate change, aging populations and increased automation.

Xi hit hard on the metaphor of the world economy as an "ocean," saying countries "must have courage to swim in the global market."

"We should not develop a habit of retreating to the harbor whenever encountering the storm, for this will never get us to the other shore of the ocean," he said.

Some of the elites listening in Davos, Switzerland, hailed a statesmanlike, even Barack Obama-like speech from Xi as the first Chinese head of state to attend the World Economic Forum — even if it depicted a Chinese commitment to open markets that falls short of reality.

"Whether you like it or not, the global economy is the big ocean you can't escape from," Xi said in delivering the forum's opening plenary speech, introduced by the forum's founder and chair, Klaus Schwab.

Xi and first lady Peng Liyuan attend the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum.

Davos , Tuesday

[Photo/Agencies]

Xi's high-profile speech also came at a time of burgeoning tensions between China and the new US government. Trump infuriated Chinese leaders last month when he spoke with Taiwan's leader, and he has continued to leave open the US's "One China" policy, which states that Taiwan is part of a single China.

Two leading state-run newspapers threatened earlier this week that China would "take off the gloves" if Trump continued on his current path with respect to Taiwan, calling the One China policy non-negotiable.