Jia Tianhao and his friends thought they would be running a fast-growing tech start up by now. But like many entrepreneurs and private sector companies in China, they are finding growth harder to come by as the world’s second-biggest economy stumbles.Their four-year-old software company, based in Alibaba’s hometown of Hangzhou is “slowing down”. We’re taking a step back and using this time to improve ourselves,” says Jia, 26.

For China, such sentiment is a problem. Headlines in recent weeks have focused on thorny debt problems which have battered the property sector and strained local government coffers. But another problem is standing in the way of the country’s economy returning to a path of sustained growth: a lack of confidence among businesspeople.

Metrics of this may be imperfect but there is evidence that confidence among consumers and entrepreneurs in China has not recovered from a plethora of policy measures under Xi Jinping’s administration, including the leader’s sweeping “common prosperity” campaign in 2021 which tackled inequality and excess while also reasserting the Chinese Communist party’s control over the country’s entrepreneurial class.