In a meeting with leading entrepreneurs this week, China’s President Xi Jinping celebrated a rising tech industry star while rehabilitating a once-venerated tycoon as he sought to restore investor confidence in the country’s struggling economy.

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.

In one step, Xi sought to reassure established figures whose tech groups powered China’s recent economic rise — some of whom have been personally targeted by government crackdowns — even as he signalled a new era for the private sector following Deepseek’s dramatic emergence this year as a rival to western AI companies.