From today’s WSJ. May not be relevant to us but surely can’t hurt.

China Plans Reprieve for Tech Giants, Including Delaying New Rules, as Economy Slows

SIN­GA­PORE—China is pre­paring to hit pause on its month­s­long cam­paign against tech­nol­ogy com­pa­nies, ac­cord­ing to peo­ple fa­mil­iar with the mat­ter, as of­fi­cials seek to ar­rest a rapid de­te­ri­o­ra­tion in the coun­try’s eco­nomic out­look.

Chi­na’s top in­ter­net reg­u­la­tor is set to meet next week with the coun­try’s em­bat­tled tech gi­ants to dis­cuss the reg­u­la­tory cam­paign, ac­cord­ing to the peo­ple, who de­scribed the meet­ing as a sign that of­fi­cials ac­knowl­edge the toll the reg­u­la­tions have had on the pri­vate sec­tor at a time when Chi­na’s eco­nomic out­look is in­creas­ingly clouded due to strict Covid mea­sures.

The gov­ern­ment has al­ready taken such mea­sures in man­ag­ing in­ter­net-con­tent com­pa­nies such as Byte­Dance Ltd., the owner of buzzy short-video plat­form Tik­Tok, and Weibo Corp., op­er­a­tor of the epony­mous Twit­ter-like mi­croblog­ging

Now, the plan is likely to be ex­panded to other tech­nol­ogy plat­form op­er­a­tors such as Ten­cent Hold­ings Ltd., Chi­na’s most valu­able com­pany, and Meituan, which runs one of Chi­na’s big­gest food-de­liv­ery ser­vices, this per­son said.

Next week’s sched­uled meet­ing, be­tween the Cy­ber­space Ad­min­is­tra­tion of China and tech gi­ants in­clud­ing Ten­cent and Meituan, comes af­ter a year in which reg­u­la­tory un­cer­tainty has trig­gered a wave of stock sell­offs and job lay­offs across the in­dus­try.

Rep­re­sen­ta­tives from Ten­cent, Meituan and the CAC didn’t im­me­di­ately re­spond to re­quests for com­ment. The South China Morn­ing Post re­ported ear­lier on next week’s meet­ing.

Any loos­en­ing of reg­u­la­tions for the tech sec­tor would un­der­score the im­por­tance of eco­nomic sta­bil­ity for Chi­nese leader Xi Jin­ping in a key po­lit­i­cal year in which he is ex­pected to break with re­cent prece­dent and seek a third term in power.

Sup­port­ing the tech sec­tor could help Chi­na’s econ­omy at a time when fore­cast­ers are rapidly down­grad­ing their ex­pec­ta­tions for growth this year amid the spread of the Omi­cron vari­ant, which has led to the month­long lock­down of Shang­hai, the coun­try’s big­gest and wealth­i­est city, and which now threat­ens to par­a­lyze Bei­jing, the cap­i­tal.

In a Fri­day meet­ing of Chi­na’s top de­ci­sion-mak­ing body chaired by Mr. Xi, se­nior Com­mu­nist Party of­fi­cials said that they would carry to com­ple­tion their cam­paign against in­ter­net com­pa­nies.

But no­tably, they did so with­out giv­ing a con­crete time­line, while mak­ing clear that any over­sight would be more stan­dard­ized to “sup­port the healthy de­vel­op­ment of the firms”—rel­a­tively dovish lan­guage that fu­eled dou­ble-digit-per­cent­age jumps in the share prices of Al­ibaba Group Hold­ing Ltd. and other Chi­nese tech stocks.

More broadly, Chi­na’s lead­er­ship said in a read­out of the meet­ing that it would step up pol­icy sup­port to meet its tar­get of ex­pand­ing gross do­mes­tic prod­uct by about 5.5% this year—a tar­get that most econ­o­mists think China will miss as the world’s sec­ond-largest econ­omy faces ris­ing risks from Covid-19 out­breaks and the war in Ukraine.

Chi­na’s cab­i­net said af­ter a Wednes­day meet­ing that it will con­tinue to pro­mote the de­vel­op­ment of in­ter­net com­pa­nies to cre­ate more jobs. At a sep­a­rate meet­ing a day ear­lier, Mr. Xi called for an in­crease in in­frastructure spend­ing to boost the econ­omy.

The Jour­nal re­ported this week that Mr. Xi had told of­fi­cials to en­sure that the coun­try’s eco­nomic growth out­paces that of the U.S. this year, a man­date that gov­ern­ment agen­cies plan to ful­fill by ac­cel­er­at­ing large-scale con­struc­tion projects in the man­u­fac­tur-ing, tech­nol­ogy, en­ergy and food sec­tors.