After China’s year of unprecedented crackdowns, roiling markets and halting deals, bankers and lawyers expect tighter scrutiny to continue in 2022 but say clearer rules will give investors some certainty about the regulatory environment.
Over the past year, Beijing has clamped down on antitrust violations, banned private tuition groups, reined in property developers’ debt binge, and made some offshore listings close to impossible.
Analysts expect those actions to extend into the new year with particular focus on data protection and deals that present national security risks while authorities also seek to step up control on private enterprise.
“Investors have been forced to consider a series of new regulatory risks over the last year, and those fears are not going to disappear any time soon,” said Logan Wright, director of China markets research at Rhodium Group.
“We’ve also seen some bureaucratic institutions successfully expanding their purviews in recent months, which broadens the range of potential regulatory concerns for investors next year,” he said.
China in November elevated the status of the antitrust unit of the State Administration for Market Regulation to the deputy-ministerial-level, a bureaucratic promotion that gives it more access to resources for probing deals.
In a sign of new measures to come, Reuters reported last week that regulators are planning to ban online brokerages from offering offshore trading services to mainland clients due to concerns about data security and capital outflows.
Separately, Beijing has expanded its practice of taking minority stakes in private companies, once limited to news outlets, to firms possessing large amounts of key data, sources have told Reuters.
Alex Roberts, a Shanghai-based counsel at Linklaters, said regulators will also look deeper into the network security of big technology companies and expects greater overlap of data and antitrust regulators’ supervisory objectives.
Those regulatory moves come as China heads into a critical year with President Xi Jinping almost certain to secure a historic third term as Communist Party leader.”The tightening (government) controls are unprecedented in the years since Deng Xiaoping gradually opened the economy,” said Andrew Collier, managing director of Hong Kong-based Orient Capital Research.
