Xi Jinping Inc.

When General Secretary Xi travels the country, he doesn’t just hang with the military. He also visits companies. Since 2012, I track 99 such visits. And the choice of firm is, of course, not random, but signals his approval and current policy priorities.

What can the eagle-eyed analyst learn from the schedule?

What has been consistent is Xi’s interest in heavy industrial kit: machine tools, construction machinery, rail transit, etc. It was the top category during the whole period and Xi maintained a steady pace of visits throughout those 13 years.

In 2013 it was Shenyang Blower, which makes large centrifugal compressors, and China First Heavy, which builds nuclear reactors. In 2025 it was Luoyang Bearing (picture below, currently headlining their website) and Yangquan Valve, which make industrial bearings and valves which go into everything from turbines to fab clean rooms.

The most striking (and surprising, to me at least) shift was the decline in visits to big state-owned enterprise (SOE) in the aerospace, aircraft and shipbuilding sectors. During 2012-15, they made up 16% of all trips – Xi was seen walking the floors of COMAC, Shenyang Aircraft, Dalian Shipbuilding, AVIC etc.

Since 2020, though, he’s only visited Changhe Aircraft (helicopters, 2023), and hasn’t visited a shipbuilder since 2018. I’d assume these types of visits would still jangle his bell, but no. Perhaps he feels the big military-industrial stuff is in hand? Or perhaps he was fed up with all the corruption?

Instead, since 2020, his visits have been dominated by bleeding-edge electronics: Siasun (robots, 2022), HGTECH Laser (2022), XGIMI (projectors, 2022), GAC Aion (EVs, 2023), NARI Group (smart grid kit, 2023), etc. Such companies made up a third of all visits during 2020-25. Semi-conductors in particular: CETC (2023, the state chip materials champion), TCL Zhonghuan (wafers, 2023), Suzhou HYC (semiconductor testing, 2023).

He hasn’t gone near firms in the cross-hairs of the “Anti-Involution” campaign recently. GAC Aion was his last car visit, in 2023.

In his first term, 2012-15, Xi didn’t mind sharing the love with software firms. Tencent (Gaming, WeChat, 2012) was his first full company visit as General Secretary, a tremendous sign of approval, followed by Neusoft (healthcare software, 2013), and Hikvision (AI surveillance, 2015). (He never visited Alibaba, Baidu, Meituan or Pinduoduo, though^[1]).

But that changed. The last software firm Xi visited was in 2016 – the mostly unknown Yixiang, a designer of e-commerce platforms.^[2] In 2023 he popped into see China-ASEAN Information Harbor in southwest Nanning, but that’s a weird SOE that says it provides ‘cross-border digital infrastructure’ for ASEAN. And then in 2024, Xi visited Shanghai’s ‘”Model Speed Space”’ Large Model AI Ecosystem (”模速空间”大模型创新生态社区) hall.

Of course, Xi Jinping much prefers SOEs - especially during 2016-19. But he’ll still find some a little time for the private sector.

Generally, Xi doesn’t meet foreign firms. Before 2023, it was just TPK Holding (Taiwan, touch panels). And in that year, Xi held his breath and popped into see LG Display (OLED screens, 2023) and then BASF Shanshan Battery Materials in 2024. Both firms have committed billions, much technology transfer and perhaps even some lobbying help back home to China. No American or Japanese firms have ever made the cut.

Finally, I asked Claude for some help summarising the visits across industry, and here is what it came up with.

^[1] The closest he got to them was in 2015 in his visit to the ‘Light of Internet’ Expo at the second World Internet Conference in Wuzhen.

^[2] In 2018 he visited Inspur, but they manufacture servers and other cloud equipment.