His appearance is a logical step in his country’s evolution into a globe-spanning superpower, a rapid transformation that has been marked by bold symbolic gestures and events in the past decade, including the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing under President Hu Jintao, Mr. Xi’s predecessor.

Mr. Xi has carried on that theme with much more aggressive actions, including overseeing construction of military infrastructure in the South China Sea’s contested waters and establishing a regional lending bank opposed by the United States.

Premiers of China, including the current one, Li Keqiang, have attended Davos before, but the nation’s president — and head of the Communist Party — has never been to the gathering.

“Clearly it signals that Xi Jinping is now interested in writing both China and himself in a grander way on the global diplomatic horizon,” said Orville Schell, director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society. “He feels it’s time to really come out. Behind that probably is an assumption and wishful thinking that the U.S. is in disarray, Europe is feckless, and so on.”

“He’ll be received almost as the number one citizen at Davos,” Mr. Schell added.

Mr. Xi plans to attend Davos on Jan. 17, during a state visit to Switzerland from Jan. 15 to 18, said Lu Kang, a Foreign Ministry spokesman, at a regularly scheduled news conference in Beijing on Tuesday. Mr. Xi is expected to speak at the opening session of the forum, which runs from Jan. 17 to 20.

Strong anti-globalization sentiments erupted last year in the movement in Britain that culminated in the popular vote by British citizens to leave the European Union. But it was Mr. Trump’s election in November that was the apotheosis of the move in the West toward isolationism, and meetings and conversations at Davos — whose theme this year is “responsive and responsible leadership” — will take place in the shadow of Mr. Trump’s campaign promises and rhetoric.

“It’s going to be very tempting for China to imagine for itself that it’s gained much more status after this election in a whole array of global endeavors, including trade and on climate change and possibly other issues,” Mr. Schell said. “If the U.S. is going to absent itself more — and we don’t know if that’s the case yet — nature does abhor a vacuum. When a father grows old, the son is sometimes able to fill the space.”