Leaders | Get poor quickly

China’s crackdown on the online-education business marks a turning-point

Less capitalism, more state

TO GET RICH is glorious, Deng Xiaoping supposedly said. “To get as rich as Jack Ma is clearly not so glorious,” quipped an investor last November when the initial public offering of Mr Ma’s Ant Group was cancelled on the say-so of China’s financial regulators. A lot of foreign investors interpreted it as a slap-down to China’s best-known billionaire and thus a warning to the country’s other plutocrats not to get too big for their boots.

This article appeared in the Leaders section of the print edition under the headline “Get poor quickly”

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