AMNC26 Day 2 - Adam Tooze on Premier Li, and other upcoming highlights

This transcript has been generated using speech recognition software and may contain errors. Please check its accuracy against the audio.

Robin Pomeroy: It's Wednesday the 24th of June 2026 and from the Annual Meeting of the New Champions in Dalian China, welcome to Radio Davos.

Give us ten minutes and we'll give you a rundown a rundown of what to expect today on Day 2 of the Summer Davos.

Get it on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, and any podcast app, including the Xiaoyuzhou app in China or on the Forum Live app, from the World Economic Forum's Summer Davos in Dalian, China, this is Radio Davos Daily.

And joining me today on Day 2 of the AMNC26 is Adam Tooze. Adam, how are you?

Adam Tooze: Yeah, good, thank you.

Robin Pomeroy: It's great to see you here. You're a historian. You're a podcaster. I'm a big fan of the Ones and Tooze podcast from Foreign Policy, which you're recording here as well.

Adam Tooze: Yeah, after the Prime Minister's speech.

Robin Pomeroy: So yes, later today, the big, probably the big moment, maybe for the whole meeting, is the premier, whose name is Li Qiang, if I'm saying his name anywhere near right. What do you expect him to say?

Adam Tooze: Well, I've heard him twice, and it is truly a highlight of these meetings.

Davos in January every year has a whole roster of senior political speakers.

One of the interesting things about the Summer Forum is that it's so focused on this one speech and I mean the two that I've heard have been very impressive industrial policy speeches essentially, it's one of the Prime Minister's role in the Chinese system to be more focused on the economy than Xi Jinping is.

So I expect him to talk about ongoing efforts by China to develop its economy. There were subtle differences in last year's speech that suggested a move towards you know stimulus of consumption i think that's what people are going to be looking out for today

Robin Pomeroy: Everyone in the world wants to see China increase its domestic consumption. They do.

Adam Tooze: They do, yes. It's essential because the rebalancing of the Chinese economy, I think, is key to many people's understanding of what needs to happen in the world economy.

In the West, there's been an extensive debate now over the last 12 months about the theme of global imbalances, which is really code for China. China's trade surplus, $1.2 trillion, really, in scale, unprecedented in a relative scale relative to the world economy also as large as we've ever seen.

And the backdrop to that is not just the power and the force and competitiveness of Chinese exports, but also the relatively tepid, in fact, non-growth in imports.

Chinese imports have not been cut, so China is not delivering the kind of negative shock to the world economy that American protectionism has for particular economies, overall American imports still remain really powerful.

But what we haven't seen is growth in imports commensurate with Chinese overall growth let alone the surge in its exports.

So that's a lot of attention. It's going to be focused on that no doubt. No doubt the premise of the speech will be read with that in mind.

Robin Pomeroy: What can he actually say or do, though, you know, in intention, we'd like to see more domestic consumption?

Adam Tooze: I mean the problem is that this is a matter not so much as crying wolf, but of credibility at this point because Beijing has been talking for too long about this issue without measurable effects.

The latest set of data on Chinese consumption from just month ago in May do not point in the right direction. So it'll be very interesting to see whether the Premier acknowledges this and if so you know what kind of reaction we're going to see.

It's genuinely fascinating to see the intensity with which this one speech is read, parsed, disassembled and scanned because decision-making in China remains relatively opaque to outsiders in particular.

Robin Pomeroy: That's at 10 o'clock this morning. You can watch it live on the World Economic Forum's website. It'll be covered, not least in China, live, I'm sure, on the media here. Premier Li's speech, 10 o'clock in the morning. And you can watch on catchup as well in the days and weeks to come.

Couple of other, there's lots of sessions going on here, discussions all over, so many of them are live streamed. One of them is with your co-host of the podcast Adam, Cameron Abadi is speaking on this one called Update on Iran. That's at nine o'clock this morning. What do you want to hear about Iran? And why is Iran so important?

Adam Tooze: I think Iran is important because, a, it's a very large country that's been hit by a war with not of its own choosing, and we should be interested in it. The implications of the damage done to the Iranian economy have become clear in this remarkable proposal for a $300 billion investment fund.

We should be also interested, however, because of its wider ramifications because obviously Iran has demonstrated its ability to control the gates, the straits of Hormuz.

Only if the Iranians get a satisfactory outcome in the negotiations will they, I think, reliably and credibly commit to maintaining the Straits of Hormuz open. Those, in turn then, affect the global energy economy.

And then thirdly, and most parochially from an American point of view, this war has raised absolutely fundamental questions about the basic logic of the Trump presidency, and so understanding more clearly where Iran is at qill have a powerful effect in shaping how Trump's second term is understood and judged.

Robin Pomeroy: It remains a sword of Damocles, though, because no matter what this agreement is, everyone knows now. I mean, everyone knew before, if anyone was paying attention, the Strait of Hormuz was this very narrow choke point that so much of that Gulf oil and other products, fertiliser, comes through. Now it's been shown Iran will do that if it wants to. Previously, it was just a strategic probability. Now it is absolute. We know it will happen. And you say, if there's a credible agreement Iran will agree not to close the Strait of Hormuz again. But I mean it's always going to be there now, it is a sword of Damocles over there.

Adam Tooze: Yes, the genie's out of the bottle, you could say. It was previously a hypothetical.

I mean, Israel and hawkish Americans have, after all, for decades been, no doubt, dreaming about launching a decapitation strike against the Iranian regime, then woke up in the morning and thought better of it, in part because of the Hormuz Straits threat. And Netanyahu and Trump, in his second term, have just gone ahead and done it. And that's really the kind of rather catastrophic reality we face.

On the other hand, if you listen to energy specialists, there's been a whole slew of really excellent panels here on energy, it's also true that the world economy has survived, which is not what people anticipated. We thought global oil would go to $150, $200 a barrel. In fact, it stayed broadly within the $100, $120 band, which was a surprise.

So on the one hand, yes, the Straits of Hormuz issue is out of the bag. It's a real threat. And on the other hand, the resilience of the global energy economy has also been demonstrated.

Not everyone gets through the same way. There are casualties in Asia in particular, but the sky hasn't fallen.

Robin Pomeroy: People can hear, watch that discussion. Nine o'clock this morning, Update on Iran.

And as you said, Adam, there's been a lot of sessions addressing the energy issue and the broader economy issues here at AMNC26.

One more I'll pick up here at 17.30, 5.30 p.m. local time. Excuse the noises if you can hear them, next door to us, we're recording this in the corridors at the Congress Centre in Dalian. 5.30, Can Intelligence Feed the World and it looks like, Adam, you're on that one.

Adam Tooze: I'm chairing it, yes.

It's a really fundamental, perhaps the most fundamental question of energy, ultimately, in this case, in the form of hydrocarbons, but of calories and protein.

And we have a star-studded panel. We have the CEO of Yara, the big fertiliser company. We have soil scientists. We have the president of China's Agricultural University. We have new tech in food represented on the panel.

So it's going to be an opportunity to get an overview of the damage done to the global food chain by the Straits of Hormuz shock, because after all, one of the things we've learned from the Iran crisis is that the Gulf is a key supplier not just of oil and gas, but of fertiliser as well to the world economy and the inputs of fertiliser.

And on the other hand, so an immediate sort of stock take, but also an overview of longer-term potential, and particularly China's role in the global food economy, because very often, of course, we focus on traded elements of global food, but the vast majority of food is actually produced and eaten in the major economic hubs, and China, India, European Union, United States are four of those big hubs. China's is the biggest.

And so, hearing from a leading expert on the Chinese agricultural economy is precisely the sort of thing that makes this a really fascinating and unique event.

Robin Pomeroy: That's at 5.30 p.m. today. Can Intelligence Feed the World.

There's lots of other sessions. You can watch them live or on catch up on the Forum's website.

Thanks Adam. Before I let you go. You're learning Chinese. You've been doing it for several years now. In an age where I can, it's funny, you must have seen this if you get in a taxi here and talk to anyone. You try to speak to them, well, you might try to speak to them in Chinese. I don't. I try to to speak them in English. They whip out their smartphone and your whole conversation is translated for you there and then.

I've not really seen this. Obviously, this tech's available anywhere you've got a smartphone. But you really see it all the time in China. Is this the end of learning? Why would you bother learning a language as difficult as Chinese when you can just get your phone to do it?

Adam Tooze: Well, in part, it's the kind of Everest thing. It's like Chinese for Westerners. I mean, 1.4 billion Chinese learn Chinese and function in it. It used to be a country with a high illiteracy rate, but since the standardisation and simplification of Chinese and the development of Putonghua in the 1950s, the entire country is literate in this language. So there's a bit of me that's just prompted by the challenge of saying, can I do this?

And in the end, this is, to my mind, a real instance of the sort of dumbing down and the enshitification of the world that transpires from outsourcing this to a machine.

I really relish and have come to deeply enjoy the experience of slowly, arduously learning this culture and this language that on the one hand can appear so remote, And then the truly stunning thing is, in fact, how structurally similar, the representation of the world is in Chinese as it is in English or German or French which are the western languages that I know well.

So the words that you feel that you need of somebody who has grown up in a western language sphere are all more or less available in Chinese and there aren't a huge number of Chinese expressions for which there aren't some version of an analogue.

Aand that basic experience of human commonality I find really uplifting, it makes me very optimistic about the world. I think it would be a terrible shame if this process of, you're linguist yourself, of immersion in different cultures through language, is replaced by some machine that can just do the work for us.

I use AI to drive my language learning, not to substitute for it.

Robin Pomeroy: Maybe that's a metaphor for the use of AI in general.

Adam Tooze: I think it's a very good metaphor for that, yes.

It's similar to chess, for instance, as well. Chess is a solved problem. It is a cracked problem. No human is going to win against the machine. But that's not the point. The point is not machines playing against machines. The point is humans playing with each other. And that, to my mind, is the same with language. I want very much to be able to speak Chinese

Robin Pomeroy: Adam Tooze, thanks very much. People can find your podcast, Ones and Tooze. And you're recording several, I believe, episodes here at the Davos on Air. You've got that beautiful studio upstairs. So people should look out for those podcasts on the Ones and Tooze feed.

Radio Davos Daily will be back one last time tomorrow morning for a rundown of day three at AMNC26. Get it on any podcast app or at wef.ch/podcasts or listen on the Forum Live app. My thanks to Adam Tooze and to you for listening. Until tomorrow, goodbye.