LITTLE RED CAPRICE:

Like a five-year-old alone in the dark, the Chinese government is afraid of everything.

It's concerned about instability and social unrest - perhaps stemming from the rising cost of living, real estate, education, and anything else where the profit motive impinges on people... and increasing levels of unemployment as economic growth slows. It's afraid of competition for power from too-big-for-their-britches billionaires who are accumulating too much data - as well as from foreign influence, via private companies or when those laowai (slang for "foreigners") get their hands on data itself.

Oh, and it doesn't want the kids to spend too much time glued to screens. (OK, this one at least has some merit.)

Ultimately, the CCP - and, more specifically, Chinese President-for-as-long-as-he-feels-like-it (following the removal of presidential term limits in 2018) Xi Jinping - craves power.

As Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith explain in the political science classic The Dictator's Handbook...

Any leader worth her salt wants as much power as she can get, and to keep it for as long as possible. Managing [various political constituencies] to that end is the act, art and science of governing.

The CCP knows that it has to keep just enough Chinese people just happy and content enough so that they don't try to disrupt the status quo. It's already clear that it's not afraid of lying to its own people.

And the 2.2-million-strong armed forces... upwards of 350 million surveillance cameras... proven genocidal tendencies (against the Uyghurs in Xinjiang province)... and a demonstrated willingness to murder its own people on a world stage (the Tiananmen Square Massacre was only three decades ago)... can keep the lid on things for a while (and maybe even decades, or generations) - but not forever.

As SupChina explains, one of the biggest reasons for China's tech crackdown is that "public disenchantment has reached a boiling point"...

[In some cases] it's clear the Chinese government is responsive to broader social disenchantment. Recently, dissatisfaction with parts of the status quo has again reached a fever pitch, ranging from frustration over the "rat race" of education to the cost of housing... These worries may have forced Beijing's hand [in part through] "tough-on-business regulations"...

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