The quick handshake that roused a multibillion-dollar Chinese juggernaut

March 13, 2025 journo

Singapore: Billionaire Alibaba co-founder Joe Tsai has lauded Chinese President Xi Jinping for bringing the country’s most famous entrepreneur, Jack Ma, in from the cold, four years after he largely vanished from public view amid a Communist Party crackdown that rattled the entire tech sector.

Xi was photographed shaking hands with Ma at a business summit last month, an event that Tsai said had given e-commerce giant Alibaba the confidence to invest more than $US50 billion ($79 billion) into its AI operations and cloud computing, as Beijing looks to technology to grow China’s sluggish economy.

Xi Jinping (right) shaking hands with once-sidelined entrepreneur Jack Ma in Beijing ahead of a business summit last month chaired by the Chinese president.

“People underestimate the importance of that meeting,” Tsai told a CNBC tech conference in Singapore on Wednesday.

“What that meeting did to the entire entrepreneur sector … is it gave private business people confidence to make investments in their business.”

China sees AI in particular as a key driver for economic development and a way to limit its vulnerability to pressure from the US in the battle for technological supremacy. The meeting has been seen as a signal that the private sector will be vital for China’s growth – and is an indication of which companies have found Xi’s favour.

Tsai said the combination of private business confidence and a renewed excitment about tech development – fuelled by the arrival of Chinese AI start-up DeepSeek – would help drive up consumer confidence, which had been a drag on China’s economy.

“Companies are making investments … making hiring decisions and are actually hiring people,” Tsai said, adding “ultimately, that will trickle through consumer confidence.”

When Xi invited Ma to the meeting last month, it marked the Alibaba co-founder’s return to the national spotlight after few public appearances since 2020.

Tsai said the message was “very, very clear”.

“The government is looking to the private enterprises to come back and boost the economy,” he said.

A week after the meeting, Alibaba announced its plans to “aggressively invest” in AI, committing $US52 billion over three years – adding firepower to China’s goal to be the global leader in AI.

Addressing hand-picked business titans at the summit last month, Xi urged them to “showcase their talents” and make significant contributions to the Chinese economy, according to state media accounts of the meeting. The remarks have triggered furiously speculation about whether Beijing was signalling a policy shift towards the private sector as it fights a tech and tariff war with America, while seeking to kickstart its sluggish economy.

The executives of Huawei, Xiaomi and BYD were among those who attended.

But a common view among China analysts is that the meeting – the first of its kind held by Xi since 2018 – was not about championing private enterprise as an engine driver of the Chinese economy. Rather, it was signalling Beijing’s recruitment of private companies to be in service of the party’s goals to usurp the US in the AI and high-tech race.

Ma’s rehabilitation was a sign that Alibaba had swung in behind the party’s priorities, said Antonia Hmaidi, a senior analyst at the Mercator Institute for China Studies, at a recent panel event.

“If you look at Alibaba when Jack Ma first disappeared, it was really focused on financial services. Now if you look at the annual reports of Alibaba it’s all focused on AI,” she said.

“[It] shows that if you are reformed to the Communist Party … then you can be invited back.”

As the lead founder of Alibaba, China’s largest e-commerce platform, Ma built a reputation as the nation’s best-known and richest entrepreneur, regarded as epitomising the spirit of the country’s surging tech potential.

But he drew the ire of Beijing when he publicly criticised Chinese regulators in a speech in October 2020, and officials set about reining in Ma’s businesses, scuppering the $US37 billion public listing of his fintech company Ant Group and fining Alibaba $US2.8 billion.

Ma withdrew from public life and had been seen in mostly low-profile settings since then.

Xi’s business summit came a fortnight before the sitting of China’s National People’s Congress, the country’s rubber stamp parliament, where China’s Premier Li Qiang declared that driving up domestic consumption – that is, giving Chinese consumers the confidence to spend money – was the government’s number one priority.

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