From today’s WSJ. May not be relevant to us but

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.