Chinese leaders have kept an eye on the big data kept by three Chinese internet giants when suggesting tighter restrictions on monopolistic practices, according to a Taiwanese observer.

Data collected by search engine Baidu, e-commerce giant Alibaba and social media company Tencent was the main reason behind President Xi Jinping’s calls for anti-monopoly measures during a recent economic meeting, said Liu Meng-chun, a research director at Chung-hua Institution for Economic Research in Taiwan.

Chinese authorities have been seeking such information to carry out their social surveillance operations, Liu said. Companies holding such valuable data will pose a threat to the Chinese Communist Party’s rule if they become too big to fail, he said.

Of these companies, Alibaba’s scale set off alarm bells for Xi, said Ding Shuh-fan, a professor at National Chengchi University’s East Asian studies institute in Taiwan.

Its fintech spinoff Ant Group, whose IPO plans were halted last-minute by regulators in November, has the capacity to absorb the largest share of savings, even beating the four leading state-run banks in this business, said Ding.

During the top-level economic meeting, Xi and other top Chinese leaders also stressed on the need to prevent chaos in the capital market.

Chinese leaders were worried that real estate bubbles and local government debts would undermine the stability of the financial market, Liu said. Some local governments would use state-owned land as collateral to obtain loans when they sought to increase their revenue through land development, he said.

“Many local governments use the loans to invest in land development projects. These have created many empty units that no one buys, and unfinished buildings,” Liu said.

Another hidden risk in China’s economy was its unemployment following the COVID-19 pandemic, Liu and Ding said. The mainland’s jobless rate could be higher than the estimated 5%, Liu said.

This year has been a difficult time for mainland university graduates seeking jobs, Ding said. “I heard that only one in four [mainland] graduates could find a job this year,” he said.

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