Xi’s tech clampdown signals end of a capitalist era With over $1 trillion in stock market losses tied to recent regulatory lurches, control is the new name of the game in China

TOKYO – China is so keen to maintain control over its sprawling and expanding economy that it’s even willing to go communist.

For all the claims from Communist Party bigwigs that President Xi Jinping isn’t on an anti-wealth crusade, the losses are too jarring to dismiss as “capitalism doing its thing.”

Indeed, the more than US$1 trillion of market capitalization losses tied directly to Xi’s recent policies has China bulls mutating into China bears.

First, it was Jack Ma’s Ant Group getting stomped by Xi’s regulators. Then Didi Global and the $100 billion private tutoring sector got the boot. Next up is Tencent Holdings, China’s top social media and video game platform.

On Tuesday, state media derided online gaming as “spiritual opium,” clearly riffing off a famous Mao Zedong-ism.

That appears to answer investors’ questions about whether Xi’s crackdown on tech and tutoring companies will stop there. The emerging question is how much the blunt-force trauma inflicted by Xi’s regulators will cost China’s wider economy?

Jack Ma’s outspoken honesty in deriding Chinese regulators invoked a severe backlash that has left his future unclear.

Economist Scott Kennedy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies speaks for many when he worries that Beijing is going “too far” in ways that will damage growth in the short run and innovation in the long run. (continues at link)

Why are both Kennedy (CSIS) and Roach, a lefty, worried about Red China’s economy slowing down re growth etc.? This would only help the Free World to tamp down Red China’s military and economic aggression, thus preventing armed conflicts and more economic/academic espionage.

At one time, CSIS was anti-communist with good level thinking about the issues. Now it sounds like this guy wants to protect the Communists. The same for Roach.

Can anyone explain why this is happening?

The article is long and interesting. It exposes what can be considered as economic policy weakness developed out of fear.

China has become too capitalist. The Chicaps are being destroyed to allow the Chicoms to exist.

Un mentioned are the many family businesses that are actually capitalist entities that interact with the Overseas China economic and trade on a global scale.

The people may not tolerate Xi and the CCP. He then has a very serious problem. That day is coming

We recently had a very high Google “AI scientist” marry into the family. I was talking to him about how someday AI could get ahead of us and take over control of things. He told me they were excited about how well things were going only a year ago. They thought they were doing the right thing in letting the “cross over” happen on turning AI loose and striking out on it’s own. He is now very concerned and even seemed afraid about what has happed in the last couple of months. He said something “unexpected” had taken place. He would not go further into it but it was beyond AI being able to strike out on it’s own. I pushed him for an explanation and he only would say “I’m very concerned about what is going to be happening in the next three months” in my response to taking to him about the momentum of the speed of digital doubling, tripling, quadrupling. He said the concern was outside of that issue? He shut right up after that. I wonder what in the hell is going on? If he knew something I wish he would tell us. He even had tears in his eyes while mentioning this grave concern they have. Could it be something about our economy collapsing? Or maybe AI taking over people’s personal or medical affairs? Something about what is going to happen to people is what I was picking up from him.

To the CCP Capitalism was just a means to an end.

During Mao’s time, it was all about breaking China’s dependency on foreigners. Once that was accomplished, they would open themselves up to the world with the intention of trapping them. Get them to produce all their goods in China, use cheap Chinese labor, while China accumulates wealth, that they turn around and invest in Western Corporations and gain leverage.

The day would inevitably come when they would pull out and create global chaos.

“China is so keen to maintain control over its sprawling and expanding economy that it’s even willing to go communist ... worries that Beijing is going “too far” in ways that will damage growth in the short run and innovation in the long run.”
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Very misleading article. The CCP under dictator and Chairman Xi Jinping MUST control its economy because the CCP is a paranoid fragile psychotic entity consisting of many of the Old Guard Revolutionaries held together by transplants and other medical devices. All threats must be controlled or treated as an enemy and eliminated.

What are those threats? Wealth, role model, personal inspiration, influence, leadership, popularity of non-leadership non-CCP members. The CCP must ALWAYS be the winner, the leader, the most popular, the most influential, the wealthiest, the role model for the people. Otherwise, some might become more powerful than the CCP, more popular, wealthy, inspiring the people to become like them and overthrown the rein of the CCP.

This is Maoism in the 21st Century. Traditional China was utterly destroyed by Mao. The people learned to keep their heads down and follow their leader of face death. For thousands of years the Chinese people were very inventive and creative (http://factsanddetails.com/china/cat2/4sub7/item30.html), but that inventiveness and creativity was destroyed by the Great Leap Backward.

Ma never spoke out against the Party - a western press myth, he only hinted that there could be a better way to do some things; but that was not his ‘crime’. He was too wealthy, too influential, too inspiring. He was forced, like others before him, to turn over his $43 billion dollar fortune by selling all of his 3 million odd shares he owned of his creation, Alibaba to the CCP. Jack Ma is someones’ spare organs.

After Deng Xiaoping pulled back the darkness of Mao’s revolution in 1986, limited capitalism flourished - China became a grey zone, rather than a black zone; he was followed by Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao. But Xi Jinping (President of the PRC, Chair of the Central Military Commission of the PRC) has returned to the absolute one-man rule of Mao.

Remnant capitalism is being crushed in the return to the black zone of Mao Zedong. Innovation is not being crushed, its being eliminated; growth is whatever the CCP claims. Both innovation and growth were mainly products of Hong Kong - the virus that was infecting the Mainland is gone now. Western investors, in any Chinese corporation, now directly support the CCP and Xi’s iron-fisted rule. Investing in China now is like investing in the old Soviet Union under Stalin. Its really not about communism so much, but about one man’s absolute control of the people, who, for the most part, hate him and what he stands for.

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