State media on Monday showed the Chinese president warmly greeting Liang Wenfeng, the youthful chief of artificial intelligence start-up DeepSeek, and shaking hands with Jack Ma, the Alibaba founder who fell from favour after criticising regulators in 2020.

Who was invited to Xi’s business symposium, which industries were represented, what the president said, when it was held – why it all matters.

The Chinese leader enjoys complete domination of party and state. But to maintain stability, he also needs to signal a succession process is in place.

Chinese leader Xi Jinping hosted Alibaba co-founder Jack Ma and the country’s top tech executives in Beijing on Monday, in a meeting that signals officials could be steering the country in a more business-friendly direction after a yearslong regulatory crackdown.

Diane Brady on Xi Jinping’s turn toward the tech sector. The big story: U.S. and Russia in talks on Ukraine. The markets: Treading water. Analyst notes from Goldman Sachs (on the U.S. economy), Apollo (on GDP),

China’s Communist Party has a history of purging then welcoming back senior officials. Deng Xiaoping was purged three times before leading the country out of Maoism in the late 1970s. Some cadres are welcomed back years after their death.

Even before President Xi Jinping met with leading Chinese entrepreneurs on Feb. 17, investors began piling into technology shares, betting that a years-long crackdown on the private sector was at an end.