Xi courts private sector

Plus, Trump imposes new restrictions on Chinese investments

Welcome back to What’s Happening in China, your weekly China brief.

I hope you’ve had a great week.

Ren Zhengfei (Huawei), Wang Chuanfu (BYD), Pony Ma (Tencent), Lei Jun (Xiaomi), Wang Xing (Meituan), Jack Ma (Alibaba), Liang Wenfeng (DeepSeek), and other prominent business leaders and entrepreneurs gathered at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing this week to receive a public show of support from the PRC’s top leader Xi Jinping.

Beijing launched a crackdown on the tech sector in 2020, fearing some firms had grown too large and powerful. The move wiped out billions of U.S. dollars in market value from Chinese tech companies, with Alibaba and its co-founder Jack Ma among the most publicized casualties. At the Bund Finance Summit in Shanghai that year, Ma accused the country of having a “pawnshop mentality” that stifled innovation. His remarks, delivered just after Wang Qishan spoke, inevitably angered officials and triggered an antitrust probe that cost the company a record 18 billion …