A crackdown of astonishing speed

[Bloomberg]( Hi all, this is Zheping. Back in 2014, when I was finishing my undergraduate degree in Shanghai, ride-hailing was almost free. Hard-charging local startups Didi and Kuaidi doled out liberal subsidies to riders and drivers, forcing Silicon Valley darling Uber to burn cash for a slice of the world’s biggest gig-economy. Some of my family friends even moonlighted as drivers outside of stable jobs with state-owned enterprises. Today, when I go back to my home city for holiday breaks, things are quite different. Didi swallowed rival Kuaidi in 2015, then famously defeated Uber a year later by acquiring its entire local operation. The Beijing-based venture now controls about 90% of China’s ride-sharing market, and I’ve started to hear complaints about rising fares and lower driver earnings. In late June, Didi pulled off the second largest-U.S. debut by a Chinese firm in history. Then China’s government[slammed on the brakes](. Beijing unfurled its investigation into alleged data violations at Didi at an [astonishing speed](. In the space of a week, China’s cyberspace watchdog opened a security review into the firm, ordered the removal of a slew of Didi services from app stores and finally, over the weekend, decided that any Chinese internet firms with a sizable user base must earn its blessing before they can go for an initial public offering abroad. It’s a stark contrast to the free-wheeling panache Didi has demonstrated throughout its decade-long history. The company had for years operated in a legal gray area, one where private-car owners on its network braved police to pick up passengers on the street. Regulators turned a blind eye to Didi’s mergers and acquisitions with smaller peers, not to mention its aggressive pricing strategies. But since late 2020, President Xi Jinping’s administration has woken up to the mounting influence internet titans hold over the life of a billion Chinese. They kicked off [a far-reaching crackdown]( that began with Jack Ma’s Ant Group Co. and Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. In recent months, China’s antitrust overseer ordered Didi to halt practices like arbitrary price hikes and unfair treatment of drivers. But the latest crackdown comes with a new spin: data. With 377 million annual active users and 13 million drivers in China, Didi produces and collects location, payment and personal data on a daily basis, as the default conveyance to students and office workers alike. Regulators haven’t yet specified data violations, but cited “national security” as an alarming catch-all for their investigation. It’s no big surprise to some snarky social media commentators: in past days, many shared a 2015 Didi study that revealed how government officials used its service to commute. Traffic at the public security ministry was among the busiest over two sweltering July days in Beijing, the study showed, while Xi’s powerful anti-corruption agency was relatively quiet. The jury is still out on what further punishments Beijing has in mind for China’s Uber-slayer, but it’s certain that the company will now have a lot to do to recover trust with users and regulators. —[Zheping Huang](mailto:zhuang245@bloomberg.net) If you read one thing When China cracked down on cryptocurrency, it left hundreds of miners in the country with massive hardware investments and no place to go. What followed has been a [desperate scramble for a new home base](. “All my money is gone,” one miner told Bloomberg. “Every day I’m losing money by not running those machines.” Sponsored Content World’s richest repository of research, white papers, webcasts, case studies, and articles on supply chain and procurement management with practical advice and actionable insights. 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