Davos 2026 | SwissCham ASIA
RE-WIRING THE WORLD
A Global Diplomatic & Business Dialogue

The world is moving—fast—and not along a peaceful track.

In Davos this year, the atmosphere felt different. The mountain air still carried the familiar weight of global attention, but the tone of the week had shifted. Too often, the stage was no longer a place to search for shared solutions, but a place to declare positions. The language of “common ground” sounded thinner. The spirit of dialogue—real dialogue—did not come easily.

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And yet, something else was equally visible: the world is not waiting.

Young generations are not waiting. Business builders are not waiting. Technology creators are not waiting. While governance slows, technology accelerates; while international order fragments, real life keeps moving. The urgent question is no longer whether change is coming—but whether we can still build the architecture for cooperation while the wiring is being rewritten in real time.

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That is why RE-WIRING THE WORLD—our SwissCham ASIA and Singularity Academy dialogue on 21 January 2026, in Klosters—mattered.

As a Board Member of SwissCham ASIA, the president of Singularity Academy, and a member of the Organising Committee of this dialogue, I felt deeply responsible for creating a space that protects what has become rare: genuine, disciplined, high-trust conversation across borders and sectors.

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Because the decisions that endure are rarely made under spotlights. They are shaped in quieter rooms—where trust is high, access is controlled, and people can speak without performing. And that is exactly what we built: a protected space, intentionally small and credible, designed for candour rather than choreography—under Chatham House rules, with no slides, and with a system-level exchange that demanded clarity over comfort.

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Just minutes from Davos, Klosters offered something Davos itself cannot easily give during WEF week: strategic distance, privacy, and calm. Davos may be the stage—but Klosters became the strategy.

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For four hours, leaders and thinkers from different countries and sectors—diplomats, CEOs, chairs, investors, academics, and system thinkers—did the harder work: not repeating headlines, but interrogating what is actually changing underneath them.

We did not pretend the world is simple.

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We looked directly at the uncomfortable tensions shaping our time—

sovereignty versus interdependence; 

technology versus governance; capital versus credibility; 

demography versus productivity—

and asked what must be redesigned if the old assumptions are no longer holding.

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And something powerful happened in that room: when people stop performing and start thinking together, the noise drops—and the signal returns.

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The most moving moments were not the “big statements,” but the human honesty behind them: the recognition that no single country, company, or institution can “solve” a rewiring world alone; that trust has become a form of capital; that governance must learn to move at the speed of technology without losing its moral spine; and that collaboration is no longer a nice word—it is a survival skill.

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One participant captured the essence of the day with a sentence that stayed with many of us:

“Each citizen has responsibility to make this world better—no selfishness, no MAGA slogans, no living in past history.”

It was not said as a slogan, but as a reminder: the future is not built only by presidents, ministers, or billionaires. It is built—or broken—by the everyday choices of citizens, leaders, founders, scholars, managers, parents, and young people who decide whether to retreat into fear or step forward into responsibility.

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In a time when common sense seems difficult to find, I witnessed something quietly radical: people choosing dialogue anyway.

Not naive dialogue. Not “let’s all agree.” But the kind of dialogue that can hold complexity without collapsing into cynicism; that can disagree without dehumanizing; that can name reality without surrendering hope.

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Because hope is not an emotion. Hope is a discipline.

At SwissCham ASIA, we believe the world can still be made better—not by wishful thinking, but by the combination of four forces:

• A right spiritual mindset — the inner discipline to resist fear, tribalism, and performative outrage.

• A progressing world-order framework — the courage to redesign institutions and rules for the era we are entering, not the era we are leaving behind.

• Collaborative execution — the ability to translate insights into cooperation that actually runs.

• Corrected morality — the insistence that technology and capital must serve humanity, not replace it.

This is why we are very proud—not in a ceremonial sense, but in the deepest sense—of every participant who invested these hours. In a world where attention is scattered, and positions harden quickly, you chose to sit at the table, to listen, to speak with courage, and to search for design principles instead of comfort narratives.

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Our responsibility as SwissCham ASIA to connect Europe and ASIA, and Singularity Academy to disrupt and rebuild the education system, is continuity. As the convening platform, we stand ready to carry the dialogue forward—beyond Davos, beyond one afternoon—into research, partnerships, and real pathways that can be executed.

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Because the world is being rewired.

The question is not whether the wiring will change—but who will help design the new architecture, and whether it will be guided by fear or by responsibility; by short-term slogans or by long-horizon cooperation; by technological power alone or by moral clarity alongside it.

On 21 January 2026 in Klosters, we saw a glimpse of what is still possible: a room where differences did not become division; where politics and economics were not separated from ethics; where business and academia met diplomacy not for photographs, but for shared clarity.

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Quiet conclusions. 

Serious thinking. 

And a renewed belief: if we put the right minds together—across sectors, across borders, across generations—humans can still make a better and truly peaceful world. 

 

 

Prof. Dr. Ying Zhang

Board Member, SwissCham ASIA

President, Singularity Academy

Chair of Organising Committee, RE-WIRING THE WORLD | A Global Diplomatic & Business &Scholar Dialogue