China has a message for its tech leaders: We need you

Chinese leader Xi Jinping signaled to leading technology entrepreneurs and CEOs that he needed the private sector to deliver economic growth and self-sufficiency, more than four years after a crackdown by Beijing that dented confidence.

- Raffaele Huang

Many of China's most prominent businesspeople gathered in Beijing to meet Xi on Monday, according to a video shown on state television. The scene represented both an expression of pride in China's technological advances and an acknowledgment that private entrepreneurs—including those who built their own businesses and competed with state-owned enterprises—were essential to China's emergence as a world economic power.

The most striking face at the meeting was Jack Ma, co-founder and longtime leader of e-commerce and cloud-computing company Alibaba, who sat in the front row of the business executives. The once-outspoken Ma was largely absent from public view in recent years after giving a speech in October 2020 that angered Xi, and his companies were at the forefront of Beijing's yearslong clampdown on the country's tech sector.

Shortly after that 2020 speech, Xi scuttled the $34 billion-plus initial public offering of Ant Group, an Alibaba financial-services affiliate. Other moves followed against private companies, especially those in the tech industry, where regulators criticized what they called disorderly expansion.