Xi Jinping has hosted a meeting of some of China’s top business leaders, including Alibaba founder Jack Ma, telling them that the government would ensure that private companies would be able to compete on equal terms with state-owned enterprises.
The meeting, which was the first of its kind for almost seven years, signalled a more benign official attitude to private enterprise after a long period during which Xi’s focus was on the state-owned sector.
“We must resolutely remove various obstacles to the equal and legal use of production factors and fair participation in market competition. We should continuously promote the fair opening of competitive areas of infrastructure to various business entities and continue to make greater efforts to solve the problems of difficult and expensive financing for private enterprises,” he said.
Among the business leaders who met Xi were Huawei chief executive Ren Zhengfei; Wang Chuanfu, chairman of electric vehicle manufacturer BYD; and Liang Wenfeng, founder of DeepSeek, the artificial intelligence start-up whose models upended expectations about AI last month.
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But the most notable face at the meeting was that of Jack Ma, once China’s most prominent tech entrepreneur who stayed out of public view for most of the past five years after he made a speech critical of China’s regulators.
The Chinese authorities have been talking up the role of the private sector in recent months amid efforts to boost confidence as the economy continues to be weighed down by a years-long property market slump. But Xi’s public demonstration of support for private companies and his embrace of China’s most important business leaders is the clearest signal yet of a shift in the policy focus.
“China’s private economy has formed a considerable scale and occupies a significant weight. There is a solid foundation for promoting the high-quality development of the private economy,” Xi said.
“The people’s living standards will steadily improve, reform and opening up will be further comprehensively deepened, especially with the rapid development of the education, science and technology undertakings, a large and high-quality talent pool and labour force resources, a well-matched industrial system and infrastructure system. The super-large market with a population of more than 1.4 billion has huge potential, bringing many new opportunities and providing greater space for the development of the private economy.”
In an effort to boost domestic consumption, the Chinese government launched a trade-in programme for consumer goods such as cars and home appliances almost a year ago, expanding the scheme in December to include other goods. But such measures tend to lose steam within about two years and there is some speculation that the next wave of stimulus measures will include vouchers for tourism and hospitality.
Xi’s long-term economic strategy is to invest in science and technology as the next drivers of economic growth and Monday’s meeting underscored the importance of the private sector in driving innovation. DeepSeek’s success has boosted market confidence in China as the country faces the prospect of a trade war with the United States and continued efforts by Washington to limit Beijing’s access to the most advanced technologies.
