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.

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.