Transitions of global power have rarely been peaceful. On Wealth Office, Michael Macfarlane set out the historical pattern. The shift from the Spanish Empire to the British involved centuries of rivalry, and the passage from British to American leadership was punctuated by two world wars. Today, he argued, the world is moving from a largely American order toward a multipolar one in which Asia plays a far larger role and Africa is rising, at least demographically. His question to Lady Linda Wong Davies was whether culture could help make this the first great transition that does not send humanity backwards.

Minds change through stories

Wong Davies answered from nearly two decades of building cultural platforms between China and the rest of the world.

Seriously, what changes people's mindsets? What changes people's heart? It's not through a set of demographics or graphs or statistics. It's cultural platforms.

— Lady Linda Wong Davies, Wealth Office

Each person, she said, has their own story about what makes them different, which they can bring to the table. In her view, those stories, more than data, are what alter how people see one another.

She also widened the frame. Speaking in March 2026, she pointed to the Middle East, which she sees stretching its wings beyond economic power, and to the long history of Persia. The new geography of culture, in her account, will not be confined to China and Africa.

Too soon for a Western sunset

Wong Davies was careful about the premise. She thinks it is too soon to say that Western dominance over the arts is facing its sunset. What she described instead is the arrival of China, just emerging from cultural isolation in the late 2000s, on the world's cultural stage. She dates that moment to the Beijing Olympics, when an extraordinary civilisation that had been dormant rose up and showed the world its potential.

Macfarlane observed that framing the question as a Western sunset itself carries Western assumptions, since it judges 5,000 years of Chinese culture by a century in which politics left it dormant. Wong Davies's account of Chinese culture supports that view.

And that's the key, I feel, about Chinese culture. It doesn't stay still, it evolves. It takes the best that it can see and then it, you know, evolves into its own.

— Lady Linda Wong Davies, Wealth Office

In her account, Chinese dynasties survived through change, and contemporary China does the same with Western influences that arrive through the internet and travel. Over 19 years she has watched early, sometimes strange configurations give way to a culture that distils its own essence. Asked whether China would become confident in its own culture, she answered that it already has.

The case for fusion

Macfarlane suggested the word blend. Wong Davies preferred fusion, and her projects show what she means. After a BBC documentary her foundation made on the vast number of young people in China learning Western instruments, the great orchestras and soloists of America and Europe beat a path to Beijing and Shanghai. That traffic ran largely one way. Her later work aimed at something more reciprocal. Handel's Semele, directed and designed by the artist Zhang Huan, who had never been to an opera, was built around a reconstructed 500-year-old Ming temple, opened in Brussels and received strong reviews in the New York Times. A Mandarin Coriolanus by a leading Beijing company, brought to the Edinburgh Festival, used two rock bands playing against each other to stage its battles.

Wong Davies saw her role as presenting. Of Frankenstein, which she brought to Chinese audiences while China was asking what kind of society it wanted to become, she said:

I'm not telling anybody what to think, I'm just presenting it.

— Lady Linda Wong Davies, Wealth Office

The aim was to start conversations among audiences themselves.

Wong Davies, now based in Africa, raised one further point. China is deeply involved in Africa, she noted, yet does not always understand that Africa is 54 countries, as different from one another as the many minority groups within China itself. Cultural understanding there will require the same patient, two-way approach.

Macfarlane suggested that in a world of increasingly endemic technology, culture matters more. Wong Davies agreed. AI enthrals, but she believes it will ultimately lack humanity, because the judgement to say no, to edit and to decide what works still sits with people.

For private wealth holders, the case is a practical one. In Wong Davies's account, cultural platforms shape how nations understand one another, and private patrons can often build them faster than institutions. Her measure of the bigger picture is a better understanding of each other's cultures, along with the economic and creative opportunities that follow. In a multipolar world, that understanding may prove to be a form of capital in its own right.