China’s tech crackdown starts to ease

China’s clampdown on its best and brightest tech companies came quickly in late 2020. Two years later authorities in Beijing are swerving rapidly back towards more predictable policymaking. On January 16th DiDi Global, a ride-hailing firm, said it would soon be allowed to resume taking on new customers after an 18-month pause during which regulators banned it from growing. A week earlier Ant Group, China’s payments and fintech giant, revealed that Jack Ma, the country’s most prominent entrepreneur, no longer held controlling rights in the company which he co-founded. Mr Ma’s ceding of control was rumoured to be one of the final steps toward political approval of the company. Shortly afterwards a senior Chinese technocrat said the tech crackdown was drawing to a close.DiDi and Ant have been bellwethers for big tech in China. DiDi’s trouncing of Uber, which ended in the Chinese firm buying its rival’s operations in the country in 2016, showed that local groups could compete with global ones. Ant’s eye-watering valuation of $300bn in 2020 suggested that China would produce the world’s next generation of dazzling consumer-internet champions. But the state’s suspension of Ant’s record-breaking initial public offering later that year, followed by a damaging probe into DiDi just days after its flotation in New York in June 2021, made it clear that all was not well in the world of Chinese tech.