(Bloomberg) -- Chinese President Xi Jinping presided over a meeting with Alibaba co-founder Jack Ma and other prominent entrepreneurs on Monday, signaling Beijing’s endorsement for a long-marginalized private sector now considered key to reviving the world’s No. 2 economy.
The country’s leader drew many of the biggest names in Chinese business over the past decade, representing industries from chipmaking and electric vehicles to AI. The summit demonstrated Beijing’s softer stance toward the companies that fuel most of economy, just as Washington ramps up a potentially debilitating campaign of global tariffs.
Xi delivered a speech after hosting Ma, Meituan’s Wang Xing and Xiaomi Corp. chief Lei Jun, state media reported. Also present were Wang Xingxing of robotics startup Unitree, DeepSeek founder Liang Wenfeng and Huawei Technologies Co. founder Ren Zhengfei — considered key figures in China’s ambition to reduce its reliance on US technology. Xi shook hands with Unitree’s Wang, Ren and Ma.
China’s leader urged the assembled founders and CEOs to maintain their competitive spirit and have confidence in the country’s future, emphasizing that the challenges they faced were “temporary.” He promised to abolish unreasonable fees or fines against private firms and level the competitive playing field — a common complaint of entrepreneurs in a state-dominated system. On Monday, China’s parliament said it would review laws centered on promoting the private economy.
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“It is necessary to resolutely remove all kinds of obstacles to the equal use of production factors and fair participation in market competition,” Xi told the entrepreneurs, according to Xinhua. Beijing should “continue to promote the fair opening of the competitive field of infrastructure to all kinds of business entities, and continue to make great efforts to solve the problem of difficult and expensive financing for private enterprises,” Xi said.
Tencent Holdings Ltd. founder Pony Ma — whose WeChat pioneered the “super app” concept that has since been lauded by Elon Musk — also attended, CCTV reported. So too did BYD Co.’s Wang Chuanfu and Contemporary Amperex Technology Co Ltd.’s Robin Zeng, driving home China’s rapid ascent in EVs.
“This is the strongest signal China could release to boost social confidence. The fact that Xi Jinping himself shows up to meet with the entrepreneurs highlights the political significance of this meeting,” said You Chuanman, senior lecturer at the School of Law, Singapore University of Social Sciences.
Chinese stocks, which surged in the past month on optimism over the nation’s advances in AI with the advent of DeepSeek’s large-language model, swung between gains and losses Monday.
“Some investors chose to take profit,” said Shen Meng, a director at boutique investment bank Chanson & Co. “Whether there will be further upside room depends on what support measures will be introduced, and it’s hard for the effects of these measures to manifest within a short period of time.”
Ma was the highest-profile casualty of Xi’s crackdown on the internet and private sector in 2020, when authorities scuttled the blockbuster initial public offering of Alibaba-affiliate Ant Group Co. That episode kicked off a yearslong campaign to tighten state control over the economy, rein in the nation’s billionaire class and shift resources toward Xi’s priorities including national security and technological self-sufficiency. Once one of China’s most outspoken entrepreneurs, Ma largely disappeared from public view after the crackdown.
But authorities have taken a less combative approach more recently as China’s economy slowed and companies aligned themselves with Xi’s push for leadership in areas like artificial intelligence.
Alibaba’s Qwen AI model has performed well in official benchmark tests and signaled the company’s growing relevance in the field. And Apple Inc. is incorporating Alibaba’s AI technology into Chinese iPhones, a vote of confidence in its prowess.
“It’s an ‘enabling policy’ rather than a 180-degree shift,” You said. “China has been pivoting from over-regulation on the property market and private sector before Covid to releasing positive policy signals to the private economy. We’ve seen a continuing shift in tone from Beijing towards the private sector: tolerance, improvement, and encouragement.”
It remains unclear to what extent authorities plan to shift their stance toward the private sector. A strong show of support by Xi would almost certainly add fuel to the stock-market rally and revive animal spirits among entrepreneurs, but much would depend on whether authorities follow through with more concrete policy actions.
Few China watchers expect the government to revert to its pre-2020 stance, even as it seeks to shore up the economy for a potential trade war with the US under President Donald Trump.
No business figure encapsulates the ups and downs of China’s private sector better than Ma, the former English school-teacher who created Alibaba from his lakeside apartment in 1999. Alibaba vanquished foreign rivals including eBay Inc. before growing into China’s largest corporation, propelling Ma’s reputation as a giant of private industry and tech innovation.
In 2015, the year after Alibaba pulled off what was then the world’s largest initial public offering, Xi and Ma met on the sidelines of a US business summit that also included foreign executives like Tim Cook and Mark Zuckerberg. That year, the pair also met at the annual government-sponsored Wuzhen gathering of internet officials and executives.
But in 2020, Ma took the stage at a Shanghai conference and let loose with a now-infamous public tirade against the state financial sector and regulators that rankled top officials in Beijing. They stunned Wall Street by shutting down Ant’s IPO days later — at the time, the world’s largest market debut —- before launching an assault against the rest of his empire.
Ma, who had been China’s highest-profile business leader, largely disappeared from public over the next few years. He gradually emerged from around 2023 with occasional visits to the Alibaba campus, including one last week, as well as posts on the company’s internal employee forum.
A meeting with Xi has the potential to supercharge a reversal of fortunes for Alibaba, which alienated investors in 2023 by unveiling a grand plan to split itself into several independent sector leaders only to scuttle that blueprint and replace key executives months later.
In 2024, Joe Tsai and Eddie Wu — two of Ma’s earliest lieutenants — decided to bet big on AI. Alibaba’s progress in that field helped the company gain more than $90 billion of market value this year.
--With assistance from Zhu Lin, Fran Wang, Wenshan Luo, Jessica Sui, Gao Yuan, Debby Wu, Vlad Savov and Mayumi Negishi.
(Updates with Xi’s comments from the fourth paragraph.)
