[Epoch Times September 03, 2021](Epoch Times reporter Xu Jian comprehensive report) In mainland China, any company that creates, collects, stores, processes or sells data seems to have sniffed one point: the era of data nationalization is coming advent.
According to a Reuters report on Wednesday (September 1), the credit scoring business of Ant Group will soon be taken over by an official company. According to the “restructuring” plan, Ant Financial will become a minority shareholder of this new company. However, the more than 1 billion user data repository owned by Ant Financial must be “confiscated.”
According to this plan, Ant Financial will only hold 35% of the shares in the new joint venture, and another non-state investor, Transchem Group, will hold 7%. The remaining shares are held by state-owned companies.
According to sources, the shareholders will invest about 500 million yuan in the new company as registered capital in an effort to build China’s third personal credit scoring company in October this year. Currently, there are two personal credit scoring companies in China, namely Baixing Credit and Pudao Credit.
Ant Financial has collected data on more than 1 billion users through “Alipay.” This includes 80 million merchants, and Sesame Credit, a third-party credit rating agency under Ant Financial, scores the credit of individuals and small businesses. Large platforms like Ant Financial have been reluctant to share these data with official credit scoring platforms for many years.
According to Bloomberg’s analysis, if the CCP is forcing Ant Financial to surrender control of its “data treasure house” and its credit scoring business only for its past troubles, then it is very wrong. In fact, the “ant” experience is not alone. . Other large companies that collect data are facing the control hand extended by Beijing to varying degrees.
Bytedance short video service “TikTok” (called TikTok in overseas version) has a wide range of products, covering news, translation, analysis and other businesses. This type of service means that it stores a large amount of data.
Earlier this year, the CCP quietly started with Douyin’s parent company, Beijing ByteDance. In August of this year, the media reported that Douyin had sold 1% of its shares to a state-owned company. The agreement also allowed the Chinese government to appoint a director of Beijing Bytedance.
Compared with Ant Financial’s drastically forced “cut meat”, Bytedance’s surrender of this 1% of shares seems insignificant, but the key point is that CCP government officials have entered the company’s board of directors. This is what Beijing is paying attention to. A clear signal.
At the same time, the ride-hailing service provider “Didi” seems to be facing a similar dilemma. Bloomberg reported that the company may transfer control of its data to a third party (state-owned enterprise).
According to Bloomberg’s analysis, the transfer of these data to the party’s hands is part of Xi Jinping’s “New Cultural Revolution”, which will give him more control over domestic culture, capital, and commerce.
To match this, in August of this year, the Chinese Communist government approved a broad privacy law. The new rules opened the door for the Chinese Communist government to gain in-depth access to any information held by any entity.
Editor in charge: Lin Yan#
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