China’s crackdown on the online-education business marks a turning-point
Jul 31st 2021
TO GET RICH is glorious, Deng Xiaoping supposedly said. “To get as rich as Jack Ma is clearly not so glorious,” quipped an investor last November when the initial public offering of Mr Ma’s Ant Group was cancelled on the say-so of China’s financial regulators. A lot of foreign investors interpreted it as a slap-down to China’s best-known billionaire and thus a warning to the country’s other plutocrats not to get too big for their boots.
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But in the months since then the scope of the regulatory crackdown has grown ever wider. China’s two internet giants, Alibaba and Tencent, are being worked over by the antitrust authorities. Earlier this month Didi Global, a ride-hailing service, was caught in the net just days after it listed in New York. And in the past week the education-technology…
