Ant's case: treating Ant like an financial institution. Setting standards on capital requirements, lending standards etc. Perform financial pressure tests similar to banks. Ant lends money, issues ABS, of course they are a financial institution, should subject to the same rules as anyone else. Upside: reduce financial risks, especially if there is economic downturn. If a financial crisis like the 07 crisis happens, the wealthy might be fine, but the middle class people might lose their jobs, their mortgaged house, their retirement investments into companies that are bankrupt. So preventing a financial crisis is protecting people's livelihoods. The government action shows its not afraid to halt a multi-billion dollar IPO to do this.

Alibaba: establishing Alibaba had "dominate position" in E-commerce industry based on market data between 2015 and 2019 and as such, require seller exclusivity is against anti-monopoly law. Upsides: Make this scenario as a precedent, deter future cases from happening. Reduce the dominate player's ability to bend the rules to hinder competition. Allow more choices for sellers, the majority of which are small businesses. Alibaba's seller exclusivity harmed both competition and the sellers.

Tencent: Establishing Tencent's taking majority of controlling stake in 中国音乐集团, resulted in Tencent being dominate position in online music service. It is illegal under anti-monopoly law for not reporting such transaction for review. And by anti-monopoly law, state council can order the entity to take action to reduce its market consolidation. The action ordered is Tencent cannot sign exclusive music licensing with upper stream suppliers. After Tencent's transaction, it signed exclusive music licensing with Warner, Sony and Universal. This has been devastating to competing music services, Netease cloud music, Xiami music, etc. Upside: Establish precedent. Ensure there is room for competition. Good for competitors.

The advisory on Meituan and food delivery platforms: Attempt to address some key public concerns about food delivery platforms. Food delivery workers extremely overworked by delivery platforms, low pay, lack of safety, insurance protection, and practices such as penalizing delivery workers for late deliveries while over stuff them with orders. Upside: good for delivery workers or other gig workers. Also good for companies because the government is not making drastic changes that destroy the fundamentals of their business. Instead, it is issuing a sensible plan of action that are not too costly for the companies. Also calls for them to investigate different approaches to solve delivery workers pain points.

The advisory on K12 education outside of school: This is a lot more controversial. The background is that most Chinese students spent their time outside of school, during weekends and summer break, in some kind of prep classes, it could be English, math, etc. Chinese parents sent their kids to these prep classes hoping their kids can get ahead of others. When I was growing up, as a primary schooler, my Saturday is Violin class, a English class, my Sunday was a math class and a English class. My summer weekday is all English and Math classes. I heard parents would sent their kindergarten kids to prep class teach grade 2 material. The thing is the prep classes is now a huge industry. Prep class companies market to parents and kids, telling them things like you can get ahead others, you need come to us to learn to get good grades to go to university. Parents spent huge amount of money on "out of school" classes. Another issue is, as these "out of school" classes and companies earn a lot of money, they can pay their teachers much more than public school. So good teachers are leaving public schools, resulting in decreasing quality, more kids have to take "outside" classes, creating a vicious cycle, adding to kids time burden and parents financial burden. The most dangerous thing this creates is segregation of education quality based on economic class. Parents with money can send their kids to place with best education resources, while parents without money send their kids to public school with lower education quality. The new k12 education advisory is about trying to return education to its public, universally benefiting nature, reducing the profit seeking tendency. It is also trying to reduce parents and kids access to "out of school" education and strengthen public school education in order to give kids more non-study time. But time will tell the impact of these policies, what are the positives, are the negatives too harmful, and unintended side effects. "advisory" in China are different than laws. They are kind of best effort, are negotiated and discussed about during actual implementation. And these advisories are updated frequently when they need changing. This is a big reform of education scene, if it is successful it will create a more healthy atmosphere for Chinese kids to grow up in and less burden on families.