In a gathering with leading entrepreneurs this week, China’s President Xi Jinping celebrated a rising tech industry star while rehabilitating a once-venerated tycoon as he sought to revive investor confidence within the country’s struggling economy.
State media on Monday showed the Chinese president warmly greeting Liang Wenfeng, the youthful chief of artificial intelligence start-up DeepSeek, and shaking hands with Jack Ma, the Alibaba founder who fell from favour after criticising regulators in 2020.
In a single step, Xi sought to reassure established figures whose tech groups powered China’s recent economic rise — a few of whom have been personally targeted by government crackdowns — whilst he signalled a brand new era for the private sector following Deepseek’s dramatic emergence this 12 months as a rival to western AI firms.
The meeting showed how quickly “political winds” can change for Chinese business, said Han Shen Lin, China country director for US consultancy The Asia Group.
“It was only a number of years ago that the identical sector was under a regulatory chokehold,” said Lin. “Now suddenly they’re the favoured son again.”
The meeting on Monday was Xi’s first high-profile encounter with private entrepreneurs in several years. He took pains to stress the entrepreneurs’ importance to China’s economic strength, referring to the “two unshakeable principles” — meaning that each the private and non-private sector ought to be supported.
But he also reiterated the ruling Chinese Communist party’s control over business, stressing that firms ought to be “ambitious in serving the country”.
“It’s a recognition that the dynamism of the private sector matters, it adds strength to the Chinese economy and to the Chinese state’s capability,” said Manoj Kewalramani, creator of a newsletter that gives every day interpretations of the CCP’s flagship People’s Each day newspaper.
Kewalramani said Xi was conveying to business leaders that “you might be invaluable players — but . . . within the grand scheme of things, you aren’t there simply to serve your individual needs”.
A lot of the attendees were involved in advanced industries, comparable to electric vehicles and batteries, robots and other electronic hardware sectors, underlining Xi’s strategy of elevating China’s manufacturing value chain because it competes with the US for tech supremacy.
Apart from Ma and Liang, the attendees included Robin Zeng, chair of leading battery maker CATL, Unitree robots’ founder Wang Xingxing and Wang Chuanfu, chair of electrical vehicle maker BYD.
“Xi desires to have a conversation with the CEOs who’re going places, pushing their industries forward,” said Rupert Hoogewerf, whose research company Hurun Report has chronicled the rise of China’s top entrepreneurs.
“That is the brand new guard that Beijing desires to encourage,” he added.
Chen Long, founding father of research group Plenum, said the timing indicated that Xi’s administration was trying to harness the positive momentum in business and investor confidence following the launch of DeepSeek’s groundbreaking AI model, which “showed China could innovate”.
“Now, this meeting removes policy risk for personal business which some investors were still frightened about,” Chen said.
Encouraging private sector investment is critical for Xi to revitalise the economy, which has been beset by slowing growth within the wake of a years-long property sector bubble.
Government data shows that public sector spending in recent times has driven fixed asset investment growth, which measures spending on infrastructure, property and equipment. Private investment, against this, has pulled back, contracting 0.1 per cent in 2024 from the previous 12 months, following a 0.4 per cent decline in 2023, reflecting caution amongst business.
But Chen said the economy was steadily pivoting towards Xi’s priorities of advanced tech and high-end manufacturing. “It’s a structural transition,” he said.
Lin of The Asia Group stressed that Xi’s message was crucially to “incentivise innovation in service of the state, not for its own sake”, with the private sector ultimately serving the party’s strategic goals.
The Chinese leader urged the business leaders present at Monday’s meeting to “actively fulfil social responsibilities” and “promote common prosperity”.
The latter term — which experts say decries excessive wealth — was invoked to justify Xi’s crackdown on the tech sector, which began with the scrapping of the IPO of Ma’s Ant Group in late 2020 and wiped billions of dollars from the market values of leading Chinese firms.
The Chinese leader promised a level playing field for personal businesses this week, and the resolution of persistent challenges comparable to high financing costs and late payment by state bodies in addition to an end to arbitrary fees, fines and inspections.
But some analysts questioned whether those pledges would stimulate a broader recovery in private sector confidence in China, beyond cheering big tech firms and their investors.
Xi and other party leaders have commonly sought to spice up business sentiment previously 12 months with guarantees to curb mistreatment of business by cash-strapped local governments trying to raise money. But the issues, which may include detentions of executives, have persevered.
A Beijing-based entrepreneur said he hoped Xi’s messaging would resolve issues comparable to delayed payments from state-owned groups.
He said a state-owned automaker had owed him almost Rmb10mn ($1.4mn) for nearly a 12 months. “It’s very difficult to pay staff without this money,” he said, asking to not be named to avoid offending his state-owned partner.
