In a meeting 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 restore investor confidence in 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 one step, Xi sought to reassure established figures whose tech groups powered China’s recent economic rise — some of whom have been personally targeted by government crackdowns — even as he signalled a new era for the private sector following Deepseek’s dramatic emergence this year as a rival to western AI companies.
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 few years ago that the same 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 emphasise the entrepreneurs’ importance to China’s economic strength, referring to the “two unshakeable principles” — meaning that both the public and private sector should be supported.
But he also reiterated the ruling Chinese Communist party’s control over business, stressing that companies should 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 capacity,” said Manoj Kewalramani, author of a newsletter that provides daily interpretations of the CCP’s flagship People’s Daily newspaper.
Kewalramani said Xi was conveying to business leaders that “you are valuable players — but . . . in the grand scheme of things, you are not there just to serve your own needs”.
Most of the attendees were involved in advanced industries, such as electric vehicles and batteries, robots and other electronic hardware sectors, underlining Xi’s strategy of elevating China’s manufacturing value chain as it competes with the US for tech supremacy.
Aside 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 electric vehicle maker BYD.
“Xi wants to have a conversation with the CEOs who are going places, pushing their industries forward,” said Rupert Hoogewerf, whose research company Hurun Report has chronicled the rise of China’s top entrepreneurs.
“This is the new guard that Beijing wants to encourage,” he added.
Chen Long, founder of research group Plenum, said the timing indicated that Xi’s administration was looking 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 private business which some investors were still worried about,” Chen said.
Encouraging private sector investment is critical for Xi to revitalise the economy, which has been beset by slowing growth in the wake of a years-long property sector bubble.
Government data shows that public sector spending in recent years has driven fixed asset investment growth, which measures spending on infrastructure, property and equipment. Private investment, by contrast, has pulled back, contracting 0.1 per cent in 2024 from the previous year, following a 0.4 per cent decline in 2023, reflecting caution among business.
But Chen said the economy was gradually 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 companies.
The Chinese leader promised a level playing field for private businesses this week, and the resolution of persistent challenges such as high financing costs and late payment by state bodies as well as 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 companies and their investors.
Xi and other party leaders have regularly sought to boost business sentiment in the past year with promises to curb mistreatment of business by cash-strapped local governments looking to raise money. But the problems, which can include detentions of executives, have persisted.
A Beijing-based entrepreneur said he hoped Xi’s messaging would resolve issues such as delayed payments from state-owned groups.
He said a state-owned automaker had owed him almost Rmb10mn ($1.4mn) for nearly a year. “It’s very difficult to pay staff without this money,” he said, asking not to be named to avoid offending his state-owned partner.