In 2021, several of China's youngest tech billionaires suddenly decided they wanted to do something else. Colin Huang, forty-one years old, had just built Pinduoduo into one of the fastest-growing e-commerce firms in Chinese history. In March 2021, he resigned as chairman. His shareholder letter said he wanted to research food science. He voluntarily surrendered his ten-to-one super voting rights and locked up his shares for three years. Zhang Yiming was thirty-eight. He'd built ByteDance into what was at the time the most valuable private company in the world. His resignation letter said he lacked some of the skills that make an ideal manager and wanted to think about long-term questions. By November he'd left the board entirely. JD[dot]com's Richard Liu handed off day-to-day management. In the span of roughly a year, several of China's largest consumer tech firms lost their founding chief executives to what was described as long-term strategy. Here's what was actually happening. Over the course of 2021, regulators had erased roughly one and a half trillion dollars in market value from Chinese tech. Alibaba was fined eighteen point two billion yuan. The for-profit tutoring sector was banned from making profits overnight. Video game playtime for minors was capped at three hours per week. Then in August, Xi Jinping gave a speech on common prosperity. No operational detail, just a framing. Within days, Tencent pledged a hundred billion yuan. Alibaba pledged a hundred billion yuan. Pinduoduo pledged its entire quarterly profit. Every pledge was called voluntary. Every resignation letter read like a script. The specific content mattered less than the founders' willingness to read it aloud. The tech founders who built China's platforms between 2010 and 2020 had been selected for one skill: building consumer platforms that could outgrow regulation. The founders inheriting the post-2021 environment are being selected for a different skill: aligning with state priorities before being told to. The old elite got a polite exit. That was the generous version. - @samuelszuchan