Beijing is not done cracking down on its tech giants just yet. Regulators have ordered social media group Tencent to stop rolling out new apps. They have also reportedly asked ride-hailing company Didi to delist from US exchanges. Should a forced delisting materialise, the impact would be widely felt.

Didi has been told to draw up a delisting plan because of concerns about possible leakage of sensitive data. Beijing is reported to have issued a deadline for the resolution of the matter. The reports were enough to push shares of Japanese tech investor SoftBank, Didi’s largest minority shareholder, down more than 5 per cent on Friday.

An unprecedented forced privatisation should worry US investors. It could spur selling across more than 240 Chinese companies, with a total market cap of over $2tn, listed in the US. Those include some of China’s largest corporations including ecommerce groups Alibaba and JD.com, and financial groups such as China Life Insurance and Lufax, the online lending arm of China’s largest insurer Ping An. The latter will have much more sensitive data than that going through Didi’s apps.