Once every generation, a city becomes the room where the world's economic future is negotiated. In November 2026, that room will be Shenzhen — a city born of reform and reinvention — as China hosts the APEC CEO Summit for the first time in over a decade. Roughly a thousand political and business leaders will gather to wrestle with the defining tensions of the Asia-Pacific moment: free trade under pressure, the promise and peril of artificial intelligence, and the long horizon of sustainable development. It is a gathering that asks, in the language of commerce and diplomacy, what kind of prospe