First published September 9, 2021, to be updated.
Over the past year, the Chinese government has embarked on a wide-ranging, severe, and unprecedented onslaught of its technology industries along with an array of powerful business interests.
In many ways, the crackdowns reinforce the essential traits of the Chinese Communist Party on the
centenary of its founding: its commitment to ideological conformity and intolerance of regime challenges. Yet much of the activity, seemingly directed by the top leader, Xí Jìnpíng 习近平, and his
Common Prosperity agenda, is driven by the need to address the extreme wealth inequality that came with four decades of capital-fueled growth.
“Red New Deal” captures some of what is going on here: The government is promising to reduce inequality and make life better for ordinary people, and many of the moves seem to have genuine popular support. It’s red because the actions have old-fashioned communist rationale, but also because companies that get in the way of the government are going to bleed.
We summarized some of the
major themes of the crackdowns at the beginning of August, but the government’s targets have expanded dramatically in just the last month. Here is SupChina’s running list of all the different crackdowns going on in China right now:
1. Fintech companies
Perhaps the first casualty of the entire crackdown was Beijing’s
suspension of Ant Group’s IPO in November following Alibaba CEO Jack Ma’s
speech at the Bund Financial Summit, in which he compared global banking regulators to “an old man’s club.” Ant Group promised to democratize the accessibility of loans to all Chinese, but opponents say that the company was
engaging in predatory lending and abusing its market position. (Along with Tencent, Ant is part of a duopoly that virtually
controls mobile and digital payments in China.)
Since then, banking regulators have forced Ant Group to
restructure as a financial holding company and
spin off its consumer credit data operations. They have also called on Ant to
help develop a state-backed digital currency, threatening the company’s popular payment networks.
2. Ecommerce and social media companies
Regulators have come down on China’s largest ecommerce and social media companies for abusing their market dominance.
Alibaba became the first and largest victim when it was
fined a record $2.8 billion on April 10. Three days later, 34 of China’s biggest platform companies were called in by antitrust regulators to rectify
monopolistic practices, including Tencent (social media), Meituan (ecommerce), Baidu (search), ByteDance (social media), and JD (ecommerce). In the following months, SAMR has fined almost all of these companies for
failing to disclose mergers,
signing exclusive contracts,
misleading marketing tactics, and other “
merger irregularities.”
Ecommerce companies have also been the main target of regulations aimed at protecting the
rights of workers. Months after a September 2020
exposé (in Chinese), which detailed the exploitative working conditions of delivery workers, Xí Jìnpíng 习近平
vowed to protect “the legitimate interests of truck drivers, couriers, and food delivery riders.” Regulators have since issued a number of rules, including
ordering online food platforms to ensure their workers earn at least the local minimum wage. Six major parcel delivery companies in late August
announced they would increase delivery fees to boost couriers’ incomes.
3. Celebrity and fan club culture
China has taken harsh measures to curb what it describes as “chaotic”
celebrity fan culture, amid growing concerns among officials that pop stars and actors are
poisoning the minds of Chinese youths. The
Cyberspace Administration of China has banned (in Chinese) the ranking of celebrities by popularity. In May, a
popular idol group show was shut down by officials after
a video (in Chinese) surfaced in which fans of the show were dumping milk into ditches in a dairy marketing campaign gone wrong. In September, Weibo, the popular social media app, announced bans on 21 K-pop fan accounts for a month after photographs of a customized airplane funded by a fan club of South Korean K-pop band BTS
emerged online.
Other measures evince Beijing’s bugbears, such as the
clampdown on artists with “incorrect political positions” or
men who were insufficiently masculine from TV shows and movies.
4. High-income individuals who avoid taxes, or make “excessively high incomes”
In August, the same day Xi Jinping
made a speech calling for the promotion of “common prosperity,” he also called for China to “clean up and adjust excessively high incomes.” Ten days later, the State Taxation Administration
announced a probe into people who have avoided taxes. Regulators have already fined a number of pop stars and actors for
tax evasion and have even ordered broadcasters to wipe the content of blacklisted celebrities — their names and faces — from the Chinese internet. The most high-profile targets so far include the actresses
Zhào Wēi 赵薇 and
Zhèng Shuǎng 郑爽.
5. Tutoring and education companies, private schools
China’s regulators made international headlines in July when they banned its
sprawling $100 billion tutoring sector from raising capital and going public. The measures come amid growing concerns that
education has become an expensive rat race with no reward for average people.
Officials also see the exorbitant cost of education as a potential obstacle to new Party plans to
increase China’s birth rates. In March, Xi Jinping
told members of an education committee that the tutoring industry placed undue burdens on children and mentioned the sector as an example of “
disorderly development” (in Chinese). Tutoring companies must now register as nonprofits by the
end of the year. Since the law came down, shares of China’s largest education company, New Oriental Education, have dropped 80%, and many tutoring companies have
gone out of business.
The tutoring crackdown is also linked to wider
reform of China’s private compulsory education sector, including by restricting profiteering in private education, banning foreign ownership of private schools, and trying to reduce the proportion of private school enrollments.
Regulations have also tried to
sever the link between expensive homes and good schools. After regulators announced
they would not guarantee school placements based on home proximity, purchases of school-district homes in several cities plummeted.
6. Gaming companies
Since 2018, China has taken aggressive aim at gaming giants Tencent and NetEase,
halting approval for new companies and
issuing draconian gaming curfews for minors. Over the summer, the scrutiny returned. A state media article in August
described video games as “spiritual opium.” That same month, China issued one of its more stringent policies yet on how long minors can play online video games. The National Press and Publication Administration
banned players under 18 from playing more than three hours a week — and only between 8 p.m. and 9 p.m. on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. The rules come after recent
revisions to the Minors Protection Law meant to prevent Chinese youth from internet addiction.
Now Beijing is
reportedly mulling a freeze on all new video game approvals.
7. Ride-sharing, car-hailing, bike-sharing, and power-bank-sharing companies
China’s antitrust regulators have
tightened their supervision of the giants of the sharing economy. In late August, the State Administration for Market Regulation began
investigating recent mergers in the
power-bank-sharing industry, which dispenses portable phone chargers for rent across China’s major cities. In June, eight enterprises in the sharing economy were ordered to rectify prices after they suddenly hiked prices following years of growth and market consolidation. Some other companies such as ride-hailer Didi have also faced regulatory scrutiny over
data security. The Alibaba-backed Hello, a bike-on-demand firm, also abruptly
suspended its plans for a U.S. IPO in late July for unknown reasons.
8. Companies that want to IPO in the U.S.
China has tightened its screws on
domestic companies trying to list overseas amid data security concerns and mounting
regulatory pressures from the U.S. Two days after
ride-hailing app Didi’s IPO in the U.S., the Cyberspace Administration of China suspended its app for violating data security protocols. The probe then widened, and app freezes fell on two other U.S.-listed Chinese companies: freight-logistics app
Full Truck Alliance and recruiting platform
Kanzhun.
Regulators have since worked to
patch a loophole in which Chinese tech companies have historically gone public overseas — known as a
VIE structure — and sought to implement the newly
passed Data Security Law (DSL). China is reportedly
planning to propose new rules that would outright ban companies with large amounts of sensitive consumer data from
going public in the U.S.
Despite all the hurdles, it seems many Chinese companies are still willing to
push ahead with Wall Street dreams.
9. Companies that make heavy use of algorithms
China has issued unprecedented rules to stop tech companies from abusing recommendation algorithms. The new cyberspace
guidelines (in Chinese) evince political and ideological motives — such as old-fashioned
censorship — but many of them also resemble arguments leveled against Big Tech in the West. They include limitations on keywords,
protections for minors, greater transparency, and better worker protections for couriers whose delivery schedules are made by machines. Algorithms are also prohibited from engaging in
differential treatment based on consumer preferences and characteristics.
10. Cloud computing firms that sell services to state and Party organizations
As part of Beijing’s sweeping Data Security Law meant to ensure sovereignty over its data, the government’s
state assets watchdog in Tianjin has ordered its state firms to
migrate cloud services from tech giants like Alibaba and Tencent to the government’s own infrastructure. Firms owned by the municipal government were also barred from renewing or signing new leasing contracts with public cloud platforms owned by Huawei, Alibaba, Tencent, China Unicom, China Mobile, and China Telecom, according to
Chinese media reports.
11. Bitcoin miners and crypto exchanges
China has banned
bitcoin mining as part of a wider crackdown on speculative investments and energy-intensive industries. Inner Mongolia became the first province
in March to implement a thorough ban. That intensified in June, when
four more regions —
Qinghai and Xinjiang, then
Yunnan, and finally,
Sichuan — announced plans to cut power supply to bitcoin mining operations leading to the shutdown of more than 90% of China’s bitcoin mining capacity. A June
notice (in Chinese) by the central bank
said that cryptocurrency trading “disrupts normal economic and financial order” and can facilitate money laundering and other crime.
The country has had a firm stance against cryptocurrencies for many years. In 2013, China’s central bank
barred financial institutions from handling
cryptocurrency transactions after its price jumped tenfold in the span of a few months. In 2017, it
also banned fundraising through initial coin offerings and
shuttered domestic bitcoin exchanges. Chinese miners, which accounted for as much as 70% of crypto mining worldwide, have now been driven out of China. Some of them have relocated overseas to
Kazakhstan, Russia, and
Texas.
12. Real estate companies and landlords
Beijing has sharpened its oversight of the country’s red-hot real estate market by tackling speculative borrowing that has fueled anxieties about financial risk. In June, eight government departments vowed to strengthen regulation and supervision over the real estate market, stressing that “
housing is for living in, not for speculation.”
In August, the China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission
launched a probe into the real estate arm of Ping An Insurance Group, one of the country’s most prominent financial groups. Regulators have asked Ping An to halt the sale of alternative investment products, leaving dozens of teams out of work. Also in August, the Beijing city government followed Shenzhen by
issuing rules prohibiting landlords from abusive practices like demanding excessive deposits from their tenants.
China’s campaign to cool its property market is alarming investors,
per Bloomberg. Analysts at Bank of America, for example, are saying that the credit squeeze in the property sector is “unnecessarily aggressive” and may weigh on industrial demand and consumption. Beijing has a tight rope to walk, as it tries to stabilize its property sector without imperiling a vital sector of the economy — the industry accounts for more than 28% of gross domestic output.
13. Private investment funds
China’s top securities regulator said that it will rein in the country’s
private equity and venture capital funds,
per Bloomberg.
The chairman of the China Securities Regulatory Commission said in a
speech that the government is dedicated to rooting out embezzlement and public equities masquerading as private equities.
14. Online insurance providers
The China Banking Regulatory Commission (CBRC) is going to target the country’s growing online insurance sector,
according to Shanghai Securities News (in Chinese, or
see this Reuters report).
15. Online short-term rental platforms
Several government agencies summoned nine
short-term rental platforms, including Airbnb and its major Chinese competitors, for a meeting on August 20,
ordering the platforms to remove listings for properties in Beijing.
16. Cosmetics and packaged food brands
China has sought to increase oversight over packaging and labeling in the rapidly growing food and cosmetics industries. In September, China’s regulators issued
new guidelines (in Chinese) to prevent excessive packaging for food and cosmetic products. The rules follow a
series of regulations earlier in the year that aims to prevent misleading labeling and product information in the cosmetics industry.
17. High-frequency stock traders
Quantitative trading — a sector that has grown rapidly alongside China’s stock market — should be regulated in a way that “best suits” the country, per the state-run
Securities Times (in Chinese).
In 2020, Chicago-based high-frequency trading firm Citadel Securities
agreed to pay a $97 million settlement for alleged trading irregularities during a 2015 market rout in China.
