For over two years, regulators from multiple agencies have brought China's biggest entertainment and tech firms to heel though new rules on everything from mergers and acquisitions and their permitted areas of activity, through to micromanaging children's access to video games. The firms have been repeatedly fined and been required to contribute large sums for the sake of "common prosperity." Many corporate founders, including those at Bytedance and Alibaba, have been pushed aside. Video game licensing was suspended for months. And in 2020 regulators abruptly cancelled the IPO of Alibaba's financial subsidiary Ant Group, which was to have been one of the biggest corporate flotations in global history.