‘Common prosperity’ goals of CCP target Chinese tech giants

Beijing : Chinese tech giants are beginning to dislike the ‘common prosperity’ goals of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), President Xi Jinping’s push to redistribute wealth in China.
Fabien Baussart, writing in The Times of Israel, said that the policy directive from President Xi is ending the domination of fintech heavyweights that began with Jack Ma’s Ant.
Ant Group’s Alipay, the digital payments app with over a billion users, is being broken up. This is the second blow to Ma after the attempted public listing of Ant, Alipay’s parent company, worth USD 37 billion, was quashed last November.
Now, Alipay’s “treasure trove” of consumer data is to be handed over to a partly state-owned credit-scoring firm. Its profit-making consumer lending arm may be excluded from any future IPO. A separate platform for the app’s profitable lending operation would be created under the plan, said Baussart.
To add insult to injury, Ant has been asked to undertake sweeping changes in its business model, “including restructuring itself into a financial holding firm”.
The Chinese regulators are also planning to break up Alipay. The regulatory measures, coincidentally, are hitting Jack Ma’s companies after Ma criticised Chinese regulators last October, saying they were stifling innovation, reported The Times of Israel.