Beijing is summoning executives again, but here's why that's causing less worry than in 2021

A food delivery driver drives past the headquarter of China's travel agency Trip.com Group in Shanghai on January 15, 2026. Jade Gao | Afp | Getty Images Beijing has stepped up corporate regulatory enforcement this year, though analysts say it's unlikely to pursue a repeat of the 2021 crackdown that wiped out more than $1 trillion from Chinese tech stocks. Since January, officials have opened a formal antitrust probe into the country's largest online travel agency Trip.com and summoned a dozen tech giants — including Alibaba, Tencent, ByteDance's Douyin, Baidu, JD.com and Meituan — over aggressive price competition and promotional claims ahead of a shopping festival in June. They also sent a stern warning earlier this month to Walmart China over repeated food-safety failures at its wholesale retailer Sam's Club. "The concentration of actions and number of companies involved inevitably brings back memories of the regulatory crackdown on internet platform companies" from more than five years ago, said Neo Wang, chief China strategist at Evercore. Over a two-year span starting in late 2020, Beijing launched a sweeping crackdown on its most powerful corporations, blocking what would've been the world's biggest stock-market debut by Alibaba's fintech Ant Group , forcing ride-hailing giant Didi Global to delist from the U.S. , and intensifying oversight across sectors from after-school tutoring to highly-leveraged property developers. …