Chinese president Xi Jinping’s speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, in which he denounced protectionism and defended globalisation, suggests that China is positioning itself to fill the void in global leadership likely to be left by the Trump administration.

Since the election of Donald Trump as US president, there has been great concern about the future of the liberal international order. Mr Trump’s victory in November raises an important question: will the emerging powers defend the existing arrangements or will they give them one final shove over the edge?

The waning of the international system has been on the cards for a while. The rate of global trade expansion has been slowing for some time. Another key element of the liberal order, the postwar network of multilateral institutions built and maintained by the US, was fragmenting before the advent of Mr Trump. And the global democratic revolution, which had seen the number of democracies nearly double after the end of the cold war, had peaked by 2000.