President Xi Jinping’s first symposium for high-profile entrepreneurs since 2018 took place on Monday, an event Bloomberg described as fuelling hope that “Beijing is shifting its stance to give the private sector a freer hand as it fights a trade war with [US President] Donald Trump.”
The symposium saw Xi sit down with Alibaba co-founder Jack Ma and leaders from robotics start-up Unitree, electric car giant BYD and AI newcomer DeepSeek, among others. Viewed as an attempt by the central government to steady public expectations and investor confidence in the wake of tariff hikes imposed by the US, the meeting also reportedly signalled to tech companies that equity financing was about to get easier.
This follows the regulatory crackdown of 2020, when Beijing made a rapid shift away from embracing entrepreneurs and towards safeguarding national security. Now, Bloomberg said, the country’s leadership appeared to be acknowledging that it needed to “harness the private sector’s full potential to compete with the US globally.”
[See more: China will ‘overtake the US in hi-tech and military manufacturing in a decade’]
Robin Xing, chief China economist at Morgan Stanley, told Bloomberg that Beijing appeared to be “repositioning the private sector as a pillar of national competitiveness amid economic and geopolitical headwinds.”
Consultant George Chen, co-chair of digital practice at the Asia Group, suggested that Xi was sending a message to Trump through the symposium: “You may have Elon Musk but I have my own strong line-up of technology leaders in China.”
According to Bloomberg Economics, high-tech industries contributed to 15 percent of China’s gross domestic product last year and are set to overtake the once massive, more recently beleaguered property sector in 2026.
