Arthur Kroeber

The famous one is that they woke up in November of 2020, realized that Alibaba's financial subsidiary was about to do this gigantic IPO.

The premise of which was that China should build a financial system that resembled that of the United States in 2005 and that this was a really smart idea.

And they said, oh, actually, that's a really dumb idea because look what that led to the U.S.

We don't want securitization.

We do not want this like financial risk generation that Ant Financial is trying to talk about.

We really need to crack down on these guys.

So they did.

But then they were also simultaneously concerned with a lot of other things that the internet platforms were up to.

And so there was this broad-based regulation of the internet sector, which weirdly for about 20 years had operated in a complete –

free-for-all land of almost no regulation whatsoever except for political censorship.

But pretty much anything else you wanted to do, you could do it with very little government interference.

It was a strange exception to the sort of regulatory norm in China.

They finally caught up and said, no, no, no, we have to regulate all these guys.

And so they went around to all of the internet companies and

And basically told them there are things that you can do that are fine and there are things that you cannot do.

And there are a lot of business models that you might be interested in doing, such as fintech, such as telehealth, such as kind of wider social media applications.

That you may not do because we think it creates too much financial risk.

We think it creates too much social stability risk.

We think it creates too much political risk for us, the Communist Party.

And so a lot of the avenues of growth for the internet companies were shut down.