Is this the beginning of the end of China’s techlash?

THE CHINESE COMMUNIST PARTY has exhibited a high tolerance for the excruciating pain felt by investors in China’s biggest technology companies. The firms’ sins ranged from throttling smaller competitors and mistreating workers to hooking young minds on video games. After forcing Didi Global to delist from New York, earlier this month regulators in effect scotched the ride-hailing giant’s relisting plans in Hong Kong. On March 14th the Wall Street Journal reported that they are preparing to slap a record fine on Tencent, an internet Goliath, for alleged anti-money-laundering violations. The next day the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), the main internet watchdog, accused Douban, a social-media platform with 200m users, of creating “severe online chaos”, marking it as a target for stricter censorship. This, combined with uncertainty over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and a rash of covid-19 outbreaks, shaved a third from the indices of Chinese tech stocks in the first two weeks of March, while America’s tech-heavy NASDAQ index remained flat (see chart).