In a speech at the China Internet Conference in Beijing on July 13 which he attended as a guest professor at Tsinghua University, the former Mayor of Chingqing Huang Qifan said that existing business models of internet firms will no longer work in the coming decade. He said “Taking advantage of weaknesses in human nature to entice purchases is actually unscrupulous or even against the law,” and that “The future competition of the internet economy has to take place in a fairer and more trustworthy environment, and companies that design their products targeting human weakness will have a hard time surviving in the long term.” Huang Qifan said the country’s tech companies have four “outstanding problems”: seeking scale and monopolistic power by burning money, designing products that take advantage of human weakness, collecting excessive user data, and charging unfair prices by abusing data. He observed “This type of business model does not produce optimal allocation of resources, and has a limited contribution to overall value creation in society”. He also said the collection of unessential data – which is not needed for digital services to operate – and requesting excessive permissions on users’ devices “will no longer work as laws and regulations in the tech sector continue to mature”.

(Comment: Huang Qifan's speech was published by the conference organiser Internet Society of China. The South China Morning Post report on the speech described it as important because it offers a rare peek into the thinking at the highest levels of the Chinese government since Beijing started cracking down on Big Tech late last year.)