The latest meeting gained much attention across the world for many reasons, the most interesting one could be its attendees. The delegates were well selected, concentrating in intelligent manufacturing, digital technology, green energy and other fields. Not surprisingly, Huawei’s founder Ren Zhengfei, Xiaomi’s Lei Jun, and BYD’s Wang Chuanfu attended this meeting. Their seats were assigned at the front row, directly in front of Xi.

These private companies played pivotal role in China’s undergoing shift from labor-intensive supplier to a technical-intensive supplier, and they stand at the front line in the technological arms race with the US. The US sanctions failed to crash Huawei, its development expenditures continuously to rise, and the installed capacity for its HarmonyOS system had exceeded 700 million. Xiaomi, a phone producer, had stepped into auto-making industry, whose Su7 had been greatly welcomed by the market (it sold 22897 units simply within the first month of 2025). Another attendee that raised attention is Liang Wenfeng, the founder of Deepseek, a newly emerged Chinese AI model, who used significantly fewer computation power and out-dated chips to achieve an equivalent model of OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Its AI breakthrough was considered as the “Sputnik moment” for China.

Astonishingly, Alibaba’s Jack Ma was also spotted by cameras in the meeting. In the 2020 Shanghai financial summit, this e-commerce titan publicly criticized the China’s financial system, claiming that there existed no systematic financial risk in China and that the excessive supervision was not necessary, restricting the development of China’s financial market. Meanwhile, the Chinese authorities seemed to be extremely concerned about the systematic financial risk and remained vigilant to unsupervised financial activities. His speech sparked heated debate in public.

Shortly afterwards, the central bank and four other financial regulators summoned Mr. Ma and two Ant Group executives for questioning, and The Shanghai Stock Exchange later on issued a statement announcing the suspension of Ant Group’s listing plans, which could have been the world largest IPOs, raising 34 billion dollars. Beyond the concerns to financial risks, there were many other factors contributed to the suspension of this IPO, including the government’s emphasis on strengthening the real economy. Chief lawyer of China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission told the media that “the rightful target of financial innovation and currency circulation should be substantial economy” and the risk of “shadow bank” should be controlled. This statement was widely interpreted as an implicit reference to Ant Group, which, despite not following standard banking regulations, had raised a similar amount of capital as traditional banks.

Jack Ma’s Alibaba was later fined 18.228 billion yuan for implementing a ‘two-choice’ monopoly in China’s domestic online retail platform. Regulators have criticized the companies for disorderly expansion, and Ma also faded from the public view for a while. Some comments interpreted these set of measures as a sign that this “socialist” economy no longer favored the private sector but to lean over the nation-owned enterprises. This fueled the market concern that the government would withdraw the support to private start-ups or even suppress them, and the confidence to investment was weakened to some extent.

The returning of Ma reflected a political courtesy. Though he didn’t deliver a speech during the meeting, his seat was assigned at the first row, and he even shook hands with the President Xi. Feng Chucheng, founding partner of Beijing-based consultancy Hutong Research, said that as the new round of trade war began, Xi Jinping’s move to invite Ma back was a strong signal—telling markets and hesitant officials that these are the key players China must firmly back amid rising risks.

The positive signal was captured by the market even prior to the meeting. Last Friday (Feb 14^th) when Reuters reported that there would possibly be a meeting between Xi and Ma, Alibaba’s stock in New York Stock Exchange rose by 4.3%. On the meeting day, the Shanghai Stock Exchange Composite Index rose by 0.42%. Shares of other private China’s tech companies also rose by varying degrees during the day.

In general, this high-level forum convened by the Chinese authorities was to reaffirm the contribution of private companies in China’s economy and promise to support their development continuously. However, the meeting simply represents a political stance, whether China’s authorities can deliver on these promises remains to be seen what policies follow.

By Xingchen Liu