The normally seamless operation at Davos suffered a hitch on Monday night when the road between Davos and Klosters was blocked by a traffic accident. Davos itself gets fiercely overcrowded during the week of the World Economic Forum, and it also suffers from the very high level of security that means that just to move around Davos requires one to go through several very high level security checks.

It is debilitating to be asked “Can you take you jacket off and empty your pockets, please” when you have just done the same thing a few minutes ago at another checkpoint and the temperature is minus 10.

All this contributes to why many delegates prefer to stay in the neighbouring village of Klosters just down the valley, and the Forum have added it to their shuttle bus network so it all works well — till there was a crash at 11 at night which blocked the road. The Forum’s shuttles were all stuck on the road and would not get back to Davos for at least an hour, and the last train had already left. So, along with many others in the same situation, I had to get a taxi but got down to Klosters after the road was cleared — so got to sleep at 3.00am.

It was not so bright in the morning as I made my way back up the valley in the restored shuttle bus service, where normally one meets all sorts of people and has a civilised conversation on whatever speciality they are pursuing at the Forum. But this morning we recounted to each other the horror of waiting two or three hours in the snowy traffic jam, before switching to what we expected from Chinese President Xi Jinping who was due to open the Forum that morning.

In the event we were all surprised by the way Xi presented such a passionate defence of multilateral global governance. China is usually seen as the problem in the system as it tries to ignore the US-dominated process that has managed human affairs since the end of the Second World War. But the imminent arrival of the isolationist Donald Trump as US president has changed everything, and now China is the leading country standing up for law and order in contrast to Trump’s habit of managing diplomacy through hot tempered tweets.

The cosmopolitan Xi also charmed his audience by using all sorts of western cultural references to put his Davos audience at ease: he quoted Charles Dickens to sum up the state of the world when he said that we are living in “the best of times, the worst of times”. The best has come from the growing wealth all over the world with developments in science and technology helping supports human civilization to go further than it ever has before. And the worst of times has come from frequent regional misery that continues and steady high levels of unemployment creating great uncertainties.

When asked what has gone wrong with globalism, he said that it was supposed to be Ali Baba’s treasure trove, but became a Pandora’s Box of problems. And he also used the US constitution to describe China’s economic development plan as “of the people by the people for the people”.

Even if Xi played with the American phrasing, knowledgeable China experts pointed out that the underlying idea of development for the people is thoroughly Chinese, as the Chinese word for “economy” means “for society to prosper and benefit the people”, which is an aim of governance advocated by Chinese sages in ancient times, as well as the modern Communist Party of China.

This is all very encouraging and exactly what Davos loves to hear. Let’s hope it is not all rhetoric without substance.