Chinese leader Xi Jinping held a rare meeting with the country’s top business leaders on Monday in an attempt to boost the confidence of China’s private sector amid the economic slowdown.
In a symbolic move, Jack Ma, cofounder of the conglomerate Alibaba Group, was invited to the symposium. Ma maintained a low profile since 2020 after Alibaba became one of Beijing’s biggest targets in its private sector crackdown.
The company was fined $2.75 billion for anti-monopoly violations in 2021 and has since undergone a major corporate restructuring and leadership changes and faces intense competition from rivals such as Pinduoduo.
Other attendees included founders of tech giants Huawei, Tencent, and Xiaomi; battery manufacturer CATL; robotics company Unitree; artificial intelligence (AI) startup DeepSeek; agricultural corporation New Hope; smart energy company Chint Group; and chip designer Will Semiconductor, according to footage of the conference.
Unitree caught public attention this month after dozens of its robots performed with female dancers in the regime’s official New Year gala, donning northeastern-style floral tops and spinning handkerchiefs.
During Monday’s symposium, Xi said the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) would “encourage, support, and guide” the development of private businesses under the framework of a socialist economic system.
He said China’s market has “huge potential” and called on private business leaders to “unify [their] thinking, strengthen [their] confidence” and contribute to China’s economic development.
The symposium was the first such meeting Xi has held in more than six years. The Chinese leader last held a symposium with private sector business leaders in November 2018, months after the first Trump administration imposed additional tariffs on Chinese imports worth $200 billion.
‘Positive Signal’ in Regulatory ‘Black Box’
Christopher Beddor, deputy China research director at Gavekal Dragonomics in Hong Kong, said the symposium is a “tacit acknowledgment that the Chinese government needs private-sector firms for its tech rivalry with the United States.”He described Ma’s presence as “hugely symbolic” of how Beijing is changing its stance toward the tech sector.
The regime “has no choice but to support them if it wants to compete with the United States,” Beddor told Reuters, adding that disruptive innovations in China are coming from private-sector companies.
Gary Ng, senior economist for Asia Pacific at Natixis, said the market interprets Ma’s inclusion as a “positive signal” and “hope for the end of the tech crackdown,” but China’s regulatory environment remains a “black box.”
Writing in the Chinese edition of The Epoch Times, U.S.-based China commentator Wang He said the CCP has already announced a series of policies in the past two years to boost China’s private sector, including draft legislation published last year to promote the private economy. However, official figures on investments and profits suggest that the policies have failed to achieve the goal.
In five of the past seven years, private fixed asset investment grew slower than fixed asset investment. In 2023 and 2024, private fixed asset investment went into negative growth by minus 0.4 percent and minus 0.1 percent, respectively. The proportion of private fixed asset investment also shrunk from 61.99 percent in 2018 to 50 percent in 2024.
Perpetual Pursuit of ‘New Balance’
During Monday’s meeting, Xi promised equal legal protection and a competitive environment for private businesses.Speaking to The Epoch Times, U.S.-based economist Davy Wong said the CCP’s overregulation of private businesses and its “wolf warrior” diplomacy has contributed to the economic challenges in China, and the regime is now attempting to rectify the problems by implementing additional rules.
The CCP’s support for private businesses will be limited by the Party’s need to maintain power, according to Wong.
Although Beijing relies on private businesses to support China’s economy, he said, it fundamentally believes that economic prosperity will lead entrepreneurs to demand political power, potentially undermining the foundation of the CCP’s rule.
CCP leaders are “worried about this force” but also aware that they can’t rely on Party loyalists for economic development; thus, they are “constantly seeking new balance points” with every new policy, Wong said, adding that some CCP officials believe they don’t need experts to boost the economy.
In a previous interview with The Epoch Times, Wong said the CCP’s policies often compete with and undermine each other, citing the regime’s introduction of pro-private economy legislation in October 2024, its push for a national “unified market,” and its directive for large businesses to establish internal CCP branches.
