[wewewedxfgdf]

Remember how China turned its tech industry into a smoking ruin - make making them all submit to political priorities:

Ant Group: China halted Ant’s IPO and forced a restructuring

Alibaba: China fined and politically disciplined Alibaba

Didi: China punished Didi after its US listing by removing its apps, freezing users, forcing delisting

Tutoring platforms: banned profit from core school-subject tutoring.

Tencent gaming: restricted youth gaming froze approvals

NetEase and gaming companies: licence freeze stopped game companies from shipping games.

Meituan: fined Meituan and forced changes to its labour and platform model.

Huya/DouYu: blocked Tencent’s game-streaming merger, stopping commercial consolidation in a major entertainment market.

Boss Zhipin / Full Truck Alliance: froze new users after listging in the US

Crypto companbies: banned crypto trading and mining, forcing exchanges offshore.

Think it's not happening to the US?

tourism - people afraid to visit

tariffs - wrecking ball to all businesses

defence - why would anyone buy US weapons after Greenland and Canada

internet clouds - Greenland made Europe decide that the US clouds can't be trusted, now sovereign computing matters and MS/AWS/Google are feeling it

finance - no one trusts the US not to turn people into "non members of global society" by banning them from visa and credit card and banking systems

[garn810]

The US is now doing a softer and broader version of the same thing to trust-based export sectors. It’s not the same method but! it is the same mechanism. The main difference is that the US damage is more reputational than structural, so it could be reversed faster (only if policy stops telling customers that dependence on America is a political risk)

[jhancock]

From my perspective curtailing Ant's plans was positive regulatory action.

Political priorities and good governance is why we have government.

[orwin]

Some of these were very good decisions imho, from someone who spent two months in Chineese rural area around ~2019.

- Tutoring platforms were a plague on Chineese youth that increased the weight of their already _very_ heavy load (tbh, i think and education reform might have been preferable, this is a stopgap, but at least it is something).

- Ant group was offering predatory consumption loans to rural China, which to me felt a lot like the "revolver credits" that plagued my country in the 80s and 90s and pushed to many to suicide (the surname cam from their english name, "revolving credit", and because my countryside had a lot of hunting rifle available to whomever). Considering how rural china is mistreaded by Chineese state and general government (and imho this is a real weakness in China politics), having this group by a huge fine for their practice and a general debt forgivness was great. Curtailing Ant's power is also good.

- Stopping consolidation is a great way to keep a market free.

- Crypto companies: mining diverted power from villages who couldn't compete on purchasing power to mining wharehouses in some state. The ban is great for the rural population at least. Also, if that can curtail the birth of Chineese cryptobros, great for the mental health of the country.

[zild3d]

> defence - why would anyone buy US weapons after Greenland and Canada

Huh? US foreign military sales are up at all time highs

"Total exports by the United States, the world’s largest supplier of arms, increased by 27 per cent. This included a 217 per cent increase in US arms exports to Europe, according to new data published today by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI)"

[https://www.sipri.org/media/press-release/2026/global-arms-f...]

[watwut]

China tech industry is smoking ruin? On what planet are you living?

[pjc50]

I suppose we should bookmark this for the next time that HN claims that the rise of China's tech industry is inevitable.

[wewewedxfgdf]

Tech crackdowns rid China of entrepreneurial capitalism https://eastasiaforum.org/2023/09/12/tech-crackdowns-rid-chi...

Why China crushed its tech giants https://www.wired.com/story/china-tech-giants-policy/

Why Big Tech May Never Recover in China https://time.com/6973119/china-big-tech-crackdown-backfiring...

Beijing can’t afford another crackdown on its tech companies https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/11/china-cant-afford-another-cr...

[yorwba]

That is about investor confidence, not company performance. The companies are for the most part still making boatloads of money, just not as much as investors naively expected to get from taking over a market with 1.4B people.

And even if foreign investors are more cautious now, there is plenty of money trapped by capital controls, so that it doesn't look like new tech companies have trouble raising capital anyway.

[HeavyStorm]

Orange and apples... China has very intentional policy behind those decisions. The US... Not so much. I don't buy that Trump and his whole cabinet are as dumb as they look, but they are only motivated by profit. And ignorance.