Opinion | At Davos, China's Li Qiang Tears Down Walls. For Now.

By 8:30 a.m. on June 24, the queue had already stretched nearly the length of the main hall at the World Economic Forum's Summer Davos in Dalian. All of it was there for one man. Premier Li Qiang arrived precisely at 10 a.m. and, by most accounts in the room, did not disappoint.

Li unveiled what he framed as "China Opportunity 2.0" — a direct rhetorical counterattack on the "China Shock 2.0" narrative that has gained traction in Washington and Brussels. Standing before nearly 2,000 attendees, most of them foreign business executives, he pledged to "tear down walls and build bridges," promised full national treatment for foreign-owned enterprises, and even held out the prospect of international astronauts aboard China's Tiangong space station. The message was unmistakable: Beijing wants you back.

Whether foreign capital believes him is a separate question entirely.

Li Qiang has every reason to be anxious. The data tells a story of steady, accelerating retreat. In 2025, China attracted 740 billion yuan in actual foreign direct investment — a decline of 9.5% from the year before, itself following a far steeper 27.1% collapse in 2024. Two consecutive years of contraction, with no obvious floor in sight.

The causes run deep. The US-China trade war that erupted in 2018 triggered the first major wave of manufacturing relocations. Taiwan's share of outbound investment directed at the mainland, once as high as 80%, has since dropped to around 10%. That exodus has since been reinforced by a broader global trend: corporations across Europe, Japan, and North America are actively building supply chains that reduce single-country dependencies — a process Washington and Brussels now openly encourage under the banner of "friend-shoring."

From roughly 2023 onward, Beijing compounded its own disadvantage with a series of moves that put multinationals on edge: expanded interpretations of the Counter-Espionage Law, tighter data security regulations, and security reviews targeting Bain & Company and Micron. Tech giants including Microsoft, Ericsson, and Texas Instruments responded by scaling back their mainland research operations or relocating entire core teams abroad. Youth unemployment among those aged 16 to 24 at one point surpassed 21%.

Against this backdrop, Li's address was the most conciliatory he has delivered at a Davos forum. Last year, the phrase "foreign enterprises" was entirely absent from his roughly 3,000-character speech. This year, it returned at least twice — most pointedly in his closing passage, where he declared that China would "comprehensively implement national treatment for foreign enterprises" and that "China's door will only open wider." The reappearance of that phrase was not incidental. It was the whole point.

Entrepreneurship Back In Beijing's Vocabulary

The most striking rhetorical shift in Li's speech had less to do with foreign companies and more to do with China's own private sector — and it was a message aimed at two audiences at once.

His explicit elevation of "entrepreneurial spirit" marks a clear departure from the "state advances, private retreats" posture that defined much of the last several years of Chinese economic governance. The regulatory crackdowns of 2021 through 2023 — which swept across tech platforms, private tutoring, and the property sector — left China's entrepreneurial class rattled. Li's Davos remarks were as much an attempt to reassure those domestic business owners as to court foreigners in the room.

"Entrepreneurs are the main force of innovation," Li declared — a line that would have read as quietly subversive not long ago. He pushed back against Western accusations of overcapacity and state subsidy in electric vehicles, artificial intelligence, and new energy, arguing that China "simply cannot afford" intervention at the scale critics allege, and that Chinese industrial strength reflects a decade of grinding private-sector effort. He then broke from his prepared remarks to invoke Huawei — which has endured years of Western sanctions — noting that the company had invested one trillion yuan in research and development over the past decade. The implied argument: China's tech champions earned their place through discipline, not subsidies.

Li also catalogued the dense supplier ecosystems that underpin Chinese manufacturing: the one-hour electronics innovation cluster of the Yangtze River Delta, the one-hour motorcycle supply chain around Chongqing, and the 30-minute robotics components network in Shenzhen. He cited Chinese open-source AI models surpassing 10 billion global downloads. And he noted that the number of newly established foreign research and development companies on the mainland grew 27.2% year-on-year to 14,000 — a rare bright spot in an otherwise bleak FDI picture.

He improvised a second time, pointing to Unitree Robotics — the firm that put humanoid robots on a national New Year's gala stage — and recalling that when he served as governor of Zhejiang province, Unitree was a startup generating only a few thousand yuan in annual revenue. "Now I hear Unitree is about to list at an implied valuation of over 42 billion yuan," he said. "And all of that in just ten years."

The reaction inside the hall was cautious but warmer than in recent years. Joseph Luc Ngai, chairman of McKinsey Greater China, observed that the forum's atmosphere had "genuinely improved compared to a few years ago," noting a shift in how participants discuss China — from treating it as a source of global problems to actively looking for opportunities there again.

A sharper reading came from a business executive present who asked not to be named. In that person's assessment, Li's address amounted to "essentially an apology and acknowledgment of the mistakes made in China's governance over the past several years — an attempt to win back foreign investors while also trying to revive confidence among private businesses." The executive then added: "If that's really what this is, we're talking about a structural shift."

That "if" is doing a great deal of work.

Both the European Chamber of Commerce in China and the American Chamber of Commerce in China have documented what they describe as a deep "self-contradiction" running through Chinese economic policy. Nothing in Li's Davos speech resolves it.

On one side of the ledger, the State Council has issued a stream of liberalizing signals: permitting fully foreign-owned hospitals, expanding visa-free entry, and lifting equity limits in the telecom sector. On the other, the security apparatus and regulatory framework that put foreign executives on edge remain entirely intact. The Counter-Espionage Law, the Data Security Law, the expansive definitions of what constitutes a state secret — all are still on the books, and still actively applied.

This dual-track system — economically welcoming, security-wise suspicious — is the structural problem that "China Opportunity 2.0" sidesteps, however compellingly Li framed the invitation. The 15th Five-Year Plan, whose inaugural year this is, sets ambitious targets for technology self-reliance that depend, in part, on restoring the confidence of the private sector and foreign capital alike. Whether that confidence can be rebuilt through speeches alone is doubtful.

What will matter is not what the premier said in Dalian, but what China's regulators and security agencies do in the months ahead. That is where the rhetoric will be tested — and where the walls, if they are truly coming down, will first be seen to move.

*Jason Wang reported from the World Economic Forum's Summer Davos in Dalian, China.

（Related： CGTN: How 'China Opportunity 2.0' offers growth potential for global businesses ｜ Latest ）