SATISH SHARMA - not just Rotigraphy.: While most of the attention has been focused on the Carney and Trump speeches at Davos, what China announced is probably even more consequential over the long run:

https://x.com/RnaudBertrand/status/2014196549715390720

Arnaud Bertrand

While most of the attention has been focused on the Carney and Trump speeches at Davos, what China announced is probably even more consequential over the long run: x.com/clashreport/st Vice Premier He Lifeng spoke about China's determination to become "the world's market" and said that boosting domestic demand was now "on top of [China's] economic agenda," as reflected in its 15th 5-year plan. In other words, China has entered a phase where it expects and aims to replace the U.S. as the world's primary consumer market. Which would be quite a tectonic shift. There's a certain irony there. This has been a key demand by the world, very much including the United States, for many years: we've all heard the repeated calls for China to rebalance its economy towards more consumption in order to reduce its trade surplus. So now - if China achieves this objective (and they generally do) - the world will get exactly what they asked for: China as a consumption powerhouse. But, crucially, it also means that the world's center of economic gravity would shift even further East: if companies worldwide sell more in China than in any other market, they have by definition a much bigger stake than they do today in China's continuous prosperity (much like they've had to date in the US's). That's the irony in the US's position. Trump weaponizes US demand and sees strong U.S. imports as weakness but that's also a key source of US power: if you make people rich from your market, you simultaneously buy a lot of goodwill. Pretty ironical to see U.S. insistence to hand this over to China. China is not stupid. They understand this full well, hence their enthusiasm and commitment to this shift. And in fact, historically speaking, that's the way China has dealt with the world: the expression 朝贡制度 (chaogong zhidu) is typically translated as "tributary system" but that's a horrendously bad translation because we immediately associate this with protection money, with countries "paying tribute" and submitting to a form of extraction. The system was in fact the exact opposite: countries were actually enthusiastic to be part of it because entering the Chaogong System was a ticket to trade with China, it bought you access to the Chinese market and to prosperity. In fact, as scholar Takeshi Hamashita showed (thefreelibrary.com/Takeshi+Hamash), when in 1839 Chinese Emperor Daoguang attempted to reduce the frequency of tribute missions to reduce expenses associated with tributary trade, tributary states such as Ryukyu protested this change, citing the economic benefit to them. In a sense not this dissimilar to Trump's attempts to reduce US imports today. I'm not saying, of course, that He Lifeng announced that China is restarting the Chaogong System - for one thing, this is just open commerce, not a formal diplomatic arrangement - but effectively what you have is the world is asking China for access to prosperity through the Chinese market, and China is happily obliging. And according to Trump, this would mean the U.S. not being "taken advantage of" anymore. In a sense, everybody gets what they want... Full He Lifeng speech here: weforum.org/stories/2026/0

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Clash Report

3:40 PM · Jan 22, 2026