Xi Jinping’s Meeting with Private Tech Entrepreneurs

The Spring Festival Gala, which airs annually on the eve of the Lunar New Year, is nicknamed “China’s super-bowl” and holds the Guinness world record for the most-watched television programme. The highlight of this year’s show was a tightly choreographed dance jointly performed by humans and 16 humanoid robots dressed in floral red-and-white traditional vests. Owned by the Chinese robotics company Unitree, which is backed by Alibaba Cloud, the company’s official statement deemed this the “perfect collision of technology and traditional culture.”

Xi Jinping led a high-profile symposium with several private technology entrepreneurs less than a month later. These included top leaders from companies such as Huawei, Xiaomi, BYD, Unitree Robotics, and DeepSeek. The most newsworthy of the entrepreneurs is Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba Group. 

This meeting is crucial in its timing. The last time such a meeting took place was in late 2018, during the trade war started by Trump’s first administration. This time around, too, the meeting is believed to be triggered by the increasing threats of tariff hikes that Trump plans to issue in the first months of his second term in office. This meeting is also being seen as Xi Jinping’s response to Trump being flanked by several tech billionaires at his inauguration. 

This meeting raises important questions about Xi’s signalling and posturing toward China’s private players, especially four years after Beijing’s stringent regulatory crackdown on the sector. Jack Ma, in many ways, is considered the public face of this crackdown. Following a controversial speech where he criticised China’s financial regulators and banks, the initial public offering of Ant Group, the fintech affiliate of Alibaba, which would have been the largest in the world, was quashed. Several controls and bans on the private sector followed. A broader regulatory overhaul addressing monopolistic behaviour, data security and the societal impact of these platforms meant that billions of dollars of market value disappeared overnight from the Chinese ed-tech, mobility, e-commerce and gaming platforms. Jack Ma retreated from public life for several months.

The roots of the crackdown are believed to be ideological. Xi has had a dismissive view of consumer technology, comparing it to “spiritual opium” because it doesn’t contribute to hard “national power” and threatens the “common prosperity” of the people. The “barbaric” growth and “disorderly expansion of capital” in the internet economy were believed to be antithetical to the CCP’s standing.

Via his public correspondence with Jack Ma and other private-sector entrepreneurs, is Xi Jinping warming up, softening his stance and embracing China’s private players? 

A closer reading of Xi’s speech at the symposium provides evidence to the contrary. A People’s Daily News article says as much and reports that Xi Jinping emphasised that the “basic policies and guidelines for the private economy have been incorporated into the system of socialism with Chinese characteristics, and will be adhered to and implemented consistently. This cannot and will not change.”

Xi’s imperatives for the private sector were to be full of “entrepreneurship and passion,” cultivate a “sense of national responsibility,” strengthen the “real economy,” promote “Chinese-style modernisation,” and keep in mind “the need for progress after being prosperous.” This is not now, and in fact, it is in line with the existing national goals of China’s science and technology ecosystem that led to the crackdown on domestic tech a few years ago. 

Xi also acknowledged the challenges faced by the private sector but dismissed them as “local rather than universal, temporary rather than long-term, and surmountable rather than being unsolvable”. He promised more stability in the regulatory landscape and provided measures helpful in implementing the same, such as rectifying arbitrary charges, fines, investigations, and seizures, as well as a more conducive financing and operating environment for privately owned enterprises. This, again, is not new. Both these complaints and commitments have been raised before and are expected to be elucidated further in the private economy promotion law that is being formulated. 

Significantly, the choice of speakers at the symposium is consistent with the status quo prioritisation of hard industrial technology. Jack Ma did not give a speech at this meeting.

At a time when the Chinese economy and stock market have been on a decline, and both DeepSeek and Huawei have caught global attention for technological innovations despite US export controls, this meeting, coupled with the public celebration of Unitree’s robotic innovations, then, is significant for Xi’s reach out to the private sector and his reiteration that they must contribute to the “real economy”, national development and the prosperity of the Chinese people. In a country of ‘paper-tigers’, as Douglas Fuller calls China’s state-owned enterprises referring to their high inefficiencies and low technological innovations despite heavy government support and subsidies, the meeting is an acknowledgement that China’s technological innovations have emerged out of private sector incentives not necessarily tied to a statist, top-down and long-term view and should be seen as Beijing’s push-and-pull tussle to controlling this beast.

However, unless supplemented by key policy changes in the coming months, the direction of policy winds for the private sector in China is unlikely to change. Beijing’s ideological instincts that led to the earlier crackdown on Chinese tech have not fully gone away.

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