Chinese Premier Li Keqiang has broken his silence to voice support for the country's tech firms to go public at home and abroad, echoing the views expressed by Vice-Premier Liu He this week at a high-level meeting chaired by China's top political advisory body chairman Wang Yang.
China will support platform companies and digital economy enterprises to raise capital in domestic and overseas stock markets "in accordance with relevant regulations and laws", Li said on Wednesday at a symposium with local government heads from 12 provinces, including Guangdong and Zhejiang.
This is the first time that Li, the second most powerful official in China's Communist Party, has publicly commented on Chinese companies' hopes to go public overseas since Beijing tightened listing rules and launched data security investigations into several firms last year.
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Li also said the government would create a stable, transparent and fair regulatory and business environment for the platform and digital economy, and keep opening up cross-border trade and welcoming foreign capital.
The symposium took place during Li's tour of the northwest province of Yunnan to collect views on how to restore economic activities amid rigid Covid-19 control measures.
Covid-19 lockdowns in Shanghai and beyond, as well as regulatory tightening by Beijing over the past 18 months, have hit Chinese tech companies hard.
Social media and video gaming giant Tencent Holdings reported nearly zero revenue growth for the first quarter, its weakest performance since going public in 2004, while e-commerce giant JD.com posted 3 billion yuan (US$444 million) in losses for the same period.
But there are signs that Beijing's 18-month crackdown on the domestic tech industry, which wiped trillions of dollars of market value from company stocks and dampened investor confidence, is coming to an end.
Liu, the top economic aide to President Xi Jinping and head of China's finance development committee, said in March the government would continue to support "all types of enterprises" to go public overseas, and promote the healthy development of internet platforms.
A 25-member Politburo meeting at the end of April chaired by Xi and attended by Li, Liu and Wang, agreed that China would roll out concrete measures to help internet firms, signalling the official end to the regulatory storm.