The Chinese Communist Party wants (a bit) less consumer internet

INVESTORS IN CHINESENPPANPPA tech stocks might feel like characters in an online “party game”, a type of multiplayer activity that became all the rage in 2023. The latest addition to the genre is “DreamStar”, released on December 15th by Tencent, China’s biggest digital giant, with a big gaming business. Players speed around a track as cartoon sheep and pandas, dodging cannon balls and grabbing magic clouds, sometimes plummeting through chasms only to end up back where they started.Tencent’s share price jumped on hopes the game would challenge the wildly popular “Eggy Party”, a similar offering from NetEase, a rival developer. A week later it fell off a cliff, as did that of NetEase, after the National Press and Publication Administration () published draft rules capping spending on online games. The next day the seemed to proffer one of those magic clouds, declaring that it desired “prosperous and healthy” development for the online-gaming industry. Tencent and NetEase shares have returned almost to where they were at the start.