More than random. There is some method behind it the pressure that the Chinese authorities are exerting on stock exchange lists with massive repercussions, as well as on the Hong Kong and Shanghai indices, on Wall Street, where the Golden Dragon index, dedicated to US-listed Chinese stocks (including Alibaba, at its lowest since listing) and on the Paris Stock Exchange, the cradle of luxury (just under a fifth of the entire capitalization), where the flagship Lvmh struggles to straighten up after a drain of about thirty billion euros, as many as it left on the ground due to the fear of the markets on the future of luxury purchases by the Chinese, who represent something more than 25% of the entire world market.
Do market concerns make sense? Undoubtedly, reading the reports in the official newspapers after the meeting which last Tuesday involved, in the presence of Xi himself, the members of the Economic and Financial Committee of the Party from which emerged the willingness to call "the highest income classes to give back to the community a part of what they have earned". Personal enrichment is no longer "revolutionary" as Deng Xiao Ping said, but must be corrected by placing at the center "the common prosperity". With a precise objective: to encourage families to have children, countering the risk of zero population growth, seen as a threat to the objectives of Greater China. In summary, the opposite of the one-child policy that accompanied the long march towards dignified development.
The culminating act of the new policy came yesterday, with the amendment to the Population Act that will allow couples to have up to three children. The State, according to the new provisions relaunched by the Xinhua agency, "promotes marriage and childbirth at the right age, prenatal and postnatal assistance", while each "couple can have three children". Already in 2016 the "one child" law had been abolished and was passed for the opposite problem to today's: stopping the population explosion. For the law to have concrete effects, however, it is necessary to convince young people to correct the lifestyles that are being imposed in the East. Hence a series of initiatives that have invested the stock exchange lists, in addition to the trend of customs.
They are finished targeting Internet companies, in principle guilty of behaviors that are beyond the control of the authorities. It began, in November, with the stop on the listing of Ant, the finance arm of Alibaba, guilty of emancipating itself from the state-owned banking system.
It continued with Didi's punishment, the Beijing Uber, guilty of having chosen the path of listing in the US, before the green light from the authorities.
I video games from Tencent I ended up in the crosshairs with the accusation of being the "opium" of the young and of spreading a distorted vision of the country's history.
This morning, then, there was the coup de grace: Beijing State Television reported that the Standing Committee of the People's Congress has passed a law of protection of personal information, or data that the companies of the Internet Economy exchange and sell like any commodity, a gold mine that the State intends to reserve only for itself. the real wealth of these subjects. There are no more precise indications on the new legislative act, other than those relating to its entry into force on September XNUMXst.
Even more explicit is the decision of outlaw private school tutors, the very expensive support of the ambitions of young students hunting for a place in the most prestigious schools.
Other measures capable of reducing the inequality between rich and poor, much more pronounced than in Europe, seem to be around the corner, judging by what President Xi suggests. We are therefore moving towards an increase in taxation for the rich to the benefit of the first foundations of welfare, and above all of the middle class which, however, certainly cannot afford the luxury of a purse Prada (-9% this morning from Hong Kong) or a duvet Moncler (another victim of the squeeze).
What are the consequences for the made in Italy? China remains a huge pool of possible customers, from clothing to food. But, probably, it will be necessary to correct the targets.
