For the Chinese companies, it’s helpful to know Beijing’s priorities.

 

 And the former Communists in Lithuania, who became entrepreneurs, are laughing out loud when they hear the words: the welfare state. It is enough for Lithuanian entrepreneurs to take care only of their own welfare. For Chinese Communists that is too little:

 "Domestically, in China priority is to reduce inequality and promote what the party calls “collective prosperity.” Internationally, it is managing the geopolitical tension with the United States.
As China’s economic growth slows and opportunities dwindle, the country’s rising inequality is becoming a time bomb in the eyes of the party, which is paranoid about social unrest and any skepticism about its legitimacy. And the tech companies are increasingly being blamed for the wealth gap, with their founders criticized as villains who take advantage of consumers and force their employees to work long hours.
Beijing was not happy last year when some big internet companies invested heavily in apps that sell vegetables to local residents. That’s because the apps could replace the mom-and-pop vegetable stands where many lower-income people make a living.

Beijing also went after Ant Group, the financial technology giant controlled by the billionaire Jack Ma, partly because it believed that Ant made it too easy for young people to take out personal loans, building up social discontent.
The government cracked down on the online education industry, too, which officials believe profits from playing on the anxieties of parents. That, in turn, has increased the cost of raising children, thus jeopardizing Beijing’s new policy of encouraging couples to have more than one child.
In April, one government official spent 12 hours as a meal delivery worker, only to make about $6. That set off widespread discussions about how badly online platforms treated their workers.
Tencent, Didi and the e-commerce giant Alibaba — known as “platform” companies — are now second-class citizens in the eyes of the government, a Beijing-based venture capitalist told me. (First-class companies develop “real” technologies like semiconductors and artificial intelligence that can help China become more self-reliant technologically, he said.) For the government, the platforms have too many users, too much data, too much capital and too much power, he said.

In the past six months, the tech giants and some star entrepreneurs have pledged their loyalty and made gestures with money and resignations. Tencent announced in April that it would spend $7.8 billion on green energy, education and village revitalization.
In April, four days after Mr. Xi visited his alma mater, Tsinghua University, in Beijing, Wang Xing, founder of the meal-delivery company Meituan and also a Tsinghua graduate, set up a foundation at the university. In June, Mr. Wang donated shares that were worth more than $2 billion to his own foundation.

A business unit of Tencent said last month that its employees were now required to leave the office by 6 p.m. on Wednesdays and 9 p.m. on other weekdays. ByteDance announced this month that it would abolish the requirement of working on Saturdays every other week, a common practice at many Chinese companies."