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by onlyrealcuzzo 1784 days ago
This doesn't make sense to me.

Centralized power is good (if that's what you want, and it seems like that's the MO of the CCP).

They just need to control it.

They should want Tencent to take over the world - with them in complete control of Tencent (which they basically already are).

Why should the CCP afraid of Tencent getting big instead of trying everything they can to make Tencent and ByteDance etc bigger?

3 comments

If they get too big and powerful they can theoretically pose a threat to Xi Jinping's hold on power. These crackdowns and the actions against Jack Ma are designed to show that the state will always be in control.
Two flaws would be to assume A) the ccp is a monolithic entity And B) they have complete control over tencent et al. Some control isn’t complete control.

Factions exist in the ccp and having outside concentrations of power can lead to dangerous fragmentation that can also affect the internal politics of the ccp

Right now, Tencent makes a lot of money selling data on Chinese citizens to the highest bidder for the purpose of ad targeting. The government isn't going to do "everything they can" to make Tencent bigger if "everything" includes allowing anyone with deep enough pockets to put their population under surveillance. Hence the network security review.