Alibaba's Jack Ma shakes Xi's hand at meeting of China's business titans

Ma's appearance signals Beijing's desire to inject confidence into the private sector

- Lim Min Zhang

BEIJING - As Chinese head honchos gathered for a meeting at the Great Hall of the People, they stood up to applaud the arrival of Chinese President Xi Jinping, a man clad in a black Mao suit who looked especially cheerful.

Mr Jack Ma, the co-founder of Alibaba, had every reason to smile. His very appearance at this rare meeting on Feb 17 between Chinese leaders and the heads of China's biggest technology firms signals a rehabilitation of sorts for him, and Beijing's desire to inject confidence into the private sector.

On the nightly news programme Xinwen Lianbo, Mr Ma was briefly shown shaking Mr Xi's hand, although the former was not cited in state media reports as among those who spoke at the meeting.

The powwow had a star-studded line-up of tech executives such as those from Huawei, BYD, Tencent and artificial intelligence (AI) darling DeepSeek.

Mr Ma is regarded as the face of China's private sector, but had earlier fallen into Beijing's bad books. In 2020, he had notoriously fallen out of the authorities' favour when an imminent US$37 billion (S$49.6 billion) initial public offering from Ant Group, the fintech firm he founded, was halted. Since then, he has kept a low public profile.

But Mr Ma, who stepped down as Alibaba chairman in 2019 but is still regarded as its spiritual leader, has resurfaced in public in recent weeks.

On Feb 13, he took photos with staff at an Alibaba-owned supermarket in Changsha in Hunan province, days after he visited the Hangzhou offices of Xianyu, an online platform for second-hand goods.