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.
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.
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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.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (left, front) in a meeting during a symposium on private enterprises at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on November 1, 2018. Photo: Xinhua alt=Chinese President Xi Jinping (left, front) in a meeting during a symposium on private enterprises at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on November 1, 2018. Photo: Xinhua>
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.
China’s “DeepSeek moment” and its implications will be “good for innovation because making AI less costly and more accessible means more companies and developers can participate in the upside of AI development, and more consumers will benefit from the proliferation of useful and cool applications”, Alibaba Group Holding’s co-founder and chairman Joe Tsai recently wrote in an op-ed column in the Post. Alibaba owns the Post.
DeepSeek’s breakthrough was matched – surpassed, in certain parameters – by other Chinese companies. Alibaba’s latest open-source Qwen artificial intelligence model called the 2.5-Max beat DeepSeek V3 to become the top-ranked non-reasoning model from a Chinese developer, according to a third-party benchmarking and ranking platform. Alibaba this week struck an agreement to supply Qwen to run on Apple’s iPhones in China, an endorsement of the company’s AI prowess.
Advances have been made elsewhere to break out of America’s technological chokehold. Huawei surprised the world in September 2023 when it launched its Mate 60 Pro flagship smartphone with its own Kirin 9000s processor that was capable of supporting 5G connectivity. The move broke through the 2020 US export restrictions that prevented Huawei from obtaining advanced integrated circuits from major contract chipmakers around the world.
Unitree’s H1 humanoid robots appeared in the 2025 Lunar New Year Gala performance on CGTN on Jan 28, 2025. Photo: Unitree alt=Unitree’s H1 humanoid robots appeared in the 2025 Lunar New Year Gala performance on CGTN on Jan 28, 2025. Photo: Unitree>
The invited companies are understood to include Huawei Technologies, Tencent Holding, Xiaomi, DeepSeek, Alibaba and Unitree Robotics, the sources said.
Spokespeople from Huawei, Tencent, Xiaomi, DeepSeek, Alibaba and Unitree declined to comment. Reuters first reported the Monday meeting, citing unidentified sources.
Among other invited companies are the so-called Six Little Dragons of China’s technology prowess: half a dozen start-ups based in the Zhejiang provincial capital of Hangzhou. Besides DeepSeek, they are the robot maker Unitree, Deep Robotics, the video game studio Game Science, the brain-machine interface innovator BrainCo and the 3D interior design software developer Manycore.
This article originally appeared in the South China Morning Post (SCMP), the most authoritative voice reporting on China and Asia for more than a century. For more SCMP stories, please explore the SCMP app or visit the SCMP’s Facebook and Twitter pages. Copyright © 2025 South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.
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