Editor’s note for Tuesday, August 17, 2021

My thoughts today:

The leader whose name our grandchildren will probably still be saying on a regular basis, Xí Jìnpíng 习近平, chaired a meeting of the Party’s leading financial working group today to “study the prevention and resolution of major financial risks, and generally do a good job in financial stability.”

According to state media reports (in Chinese) about the meeting, one of Xi’s demands was to “clean up and adjust excessively high income and rectify income distribution.”

So it makes a lot of sense that China’s billionaires are allocating ever greater portions of their fortunes to nonprofits and philanthropy.

Meanwhile, the source of many of those billionaires’ wealth, the internet business, has also become much more difficult: today’s top story is about yet another set of new regulations targeting tech companies.

Meanwhile, the Pollyanna capitalists at BlackRock are undaunted, and have called for “investors to lift allocations to China’s markets,” according to the Financial Times.

Our word of the day is excessively high income (过高收入 guògāo shōurù).

—Jeremy Goldkorn, Editor-in-Chief