Chinese authorities continue to fight dissent voiced by the local business elite. Entrepreneur and billionaire Wang Xing has been dragged into a major scandal after he sparked a social media furore by posting a poem. The literary work criticises the emperor of the Qin dynasty who burnt books to suppress intellectual dissidents.
Internet users interpreted the post as an allusion to the anti-monopoly campaign of President Xi Jinping. The message was immediately removed. However, the web remembers everything, as you know. The post did not go unnoticed by the Chinese government. As a result, the founder of food delivery giant Meituan had to donate shares worth more than $2 billion to charity. Furthermore, the company came under the scrutiny of China's anti-trust regulator which announced a probe into Wang’s business.
Now Meituan could be fined about $1 billion for abuse of market dominance. The regulator requires the company to put a stop to a practice known as “er xuan yi,” or “choose one of two”. Such an agreement forces many small enterprises to choose sides in the nation’s competitive retail industry.
The fact that China's authorities are putting pressure on local business has long gone beyond the country. The government's vigorous regulations and firm control over local businesses have forced global investors to revise their growth projections for a number of Chinese firms. Notably, Meituan, with a market capitalization of about $170 billion, has raised billions of dollars from global investors and is China's third-most-valuable internet company behind Tencent and Alibaba.
