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

THE CHINESE COMMUNIST PARTYCACNASDAQ 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 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 (), 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 , shaved a third from the indices of Chinese tech stocks in the first two weeks of March, while America’s tech-heavy index remained flat (see chart).Yet the pain of the spiralling tech sell-off, which at its deepest wiped out more than $2trn in overall market value, may be becoming too much to bear even for desensitised party bosses. On March 16th Xinhua, a state news agency, published a report from a meeting of the central government chaired by Liu He, China’s top economic adviser. The agency declared that the “rectification” of large Chinese technology companies would soon come to a close. New regulations should be transparent, Mr Liu was supposed to have urged, and policymakers must be cautious when implementing rules that might hurt the market, according to Xinhua. Moreover, state media reassured readers, the Chinese leadership would stabilise stockmarkets. It may even support foreign listings of Chinese companies, which it has discouraged or, as in Didi’s case, opposed.