China’s president, Xi Jinping, has met some of the country’s top business leaders, including the Alibaba founder, Jack Ma, as he attempts to halt an economic slump in the world’s second-largest economy.
Xi met Ma, who was at the centre of a crackdown on the tech industry in recent years, as well as the bosses of the electric carmaker BYD, the battery manufacturer CATL, Tencent, Xiaomi, and the founder of Huawei, Ren Zhengfei
The Chinese president was attending a symposium on private enterprises, where he gave a speech – the contents of which have not been disclosed.
Xi has spearheaded campaigns to increase government control over private industry, particularly in technology, which was considered to be unruly and disruptive as it underwent huge expansion seemingly unbothered by the tight government controls around other industries.
But the country is now struggling with an economic downturn driven by a housing crisis, stagnant low consumption and high youth unemployment.
The meeting took place at Beijing’s Great Hall of the People, with video on the state broadcaster CCTV on Monday showing Ma standing and applauding as Xi entered a lavish room. Xi, Ren, and BYD’s Wang Chuanfu were filmed giving speeches but no audio or transcripts have been published.
Liang Wenfeng, the founder of DeepSeek, a startup that is threatening to upset the tech world order with its artificial intelligence models, was also present.
The presence of top executives and companies at these high-profile events are typically seen by foreign investors as a sign of the businesses or individuals that are favoured by the government.
The meeting with Ma was closely watched as the billionaire was once the most high-profile target of regulators, and once disappeared from public view for several months after a speech in 2020 in which he criticised Xi.
Investors on Monday were scouring pictures and footage of the meeting to spot top bosses and trading accordingly.
Executives from two of the Chinese tech industry’s biggest players – Bytedance, the parent company of TikTok, and Baidu, which specialises in search and AI – did not attend, Reuters reported.
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Baidu shares fell by more than 8% – the largest loser on the Hang Seng index – after no top executive was spotted. However, reports of Xi’s visit to the symposium, which first emerged on Friday, helped spur gains in Asian markets as it raised hopes of renewed support in China’s private tech sector, which has been targeted by rounds of government crackdowns in the last few years.
Trivium, an analytics company focusing on China, has said that the meeting was “high stakes” but that a similar one held in 2018 actually preceded Xi’s years-long crackdown on the private sector.
“If Xi can convince attendees (and the markets) that he is now pro-business, it will go a long way to rousing animal spirits and putting the economy on a better trajectory,” it said. “But if Xi uses the symposium to emphasise that private companies prosper at the will of the state, it could tank sentiment even further.”
