 "Xi Jinping")
Xi Jinping's hymn to globalisation at Davos may have won acclaim from the meeting's well-heeled elite, but Chinese experts say it was distinctly out of tune with an administration that is increasingly closed and hostile to the outside world.
In his highly anticipated keynote speech on Tuesday, Xi insisted China was committed to "opening up" and said there was "no point in blaming economic globalisation for the world's problems".
The remarks received high praise from 3,000 of the great and the good gathered in the Swiss ski resort, looking for a hero to stand against the massing forces of protectionism in Europe and the US.
But the Chinese president makes for an odd idol: far from welcoming the outside world, he has overseen a sprawling crackdown aimed at rooting out foreign influence in law, academia, civil society, and technology.
Since he became leader of the ruling Communist Party in 2012, the government has moved away from liberalisation on several fronts, strengthening state-owned enterprises, increasing capital controls, and heightening restrictions on free exchange of information and ideas online.
If anything, China's commitment to open markets has "deteriorated" under Xi's leadership, Willy Lam, professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, told AFP: "There has been a retrogression."
So it is "ironic and contradictory" for people to see him as a potential champion of globalisation, he said.
China maintains wide-scale prohibitions on foreign investments even as its companies spend billions snapping up stakes in European companies, sports clubs, airports and other infrastructure.
Beijing has urged its firms to go abroad in search of higher returns and advanced technologies to make them more competitive in a range of high-value sectors, from aerospace to agribusiness and robotics.
But at home, strict limits on foreign investments often force overseas companies to partner with local competitors and share vital technology.
