Hong Kong companies will lose their edge and become indistinguishable from Chinese firms as the Communist Party issued new guidelines designed to strengthen its control over the private sector, commentators have said.

The strategy makes Hong Kong businesspeople with investments in the mainland targets of the United Front, an alliance built to expand the CCP’s influence and control over different sectors.

The guidelines were outlined in a report released on Tuesday by the party’s General Office and were discussed the following day at a meeting on extending the United Front across the country’s private sector.

The new policies state that the party should strengthen its political influence on private business operators by “educating and inducing them to apply Xi Jinping’s ideology of socialism with Chinese characteristics” and making sure they are “highly consistent with the party’s leaders” on political matters.

The guidelines' stern tone reflected the CCP’s worries that privately owned companies could become powerful enough to challenge the party’s rule, said Wu Qiang, a Beijing-based political commentator.

The reason for taking a hard-line approach was to strengthen the party’s control of private companies and to prevent them from supporting social movements in the mainland and Hong Kong, Wu said.

Hong Kong entrepreneurs looking to do businesses in the mainland must accept the new guidelines, said Johnny Lau, a veteran political commentator on China. But in doing this, Hong Kong firms would lose their competitive edge and become the same as other mainland companies, he said.

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