Chinese President Xi Jinping will host a meeting next week with some of the nation’s top entrepreneurs – including six Hangzhou-based start-ups known as the “Six Little Dragons” – to recognise progress in critical areas of technological advancement and show support to the private sector, according to sources.
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Between 20 and 30 founders and chief executives from China’s largest technology companies were expected to assemble in Beijing on Monday, according to the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
The meeting comes at a critical time for China before the national legislature and the political advisory body enter their annual meetings to formulate the nation’s strategies to regain its economic growth pace and chart a course through the evolving trade war and technological race with the US. The “two sessions” process is also expected to legislate to better protect the private sector, the Ministry of Justice said last October.
Against the headwinds, companies such as DeepSeek and Huawei have broken through with new services and products that have mitigated US restrictions, the sources said.
DeepSeek in December launched a low-cost large language model (LLM) with 671 billion parameters called the DeepSeek V3, which it claimed was trained in around two months for US$5.58 million. The feat by the Hangzhou-based company seemed to challenge Silicon Valley’s dominance in artificial intelligence, which thus far has been led by US companies such as OpenAI, Microsoft and Google.
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