Information can help them to get control.
They also want taxes or revenues.
And many countries that have gone through revolutions or have failed,
have failed because they're no longer able to collect tax from their citizens.
When a country has lost the trust of its people,
when it's lost the ability to enforce tax or collection policies.
That is a government heading for collapse.
And so, of course, China doesn't want to be even close,
not even near to anything of that sort of risk.
And so they need better controls, better information, and
therefore a better information economy.
And regulations that enforce both the tax collection ability,
and the ability to know what is happening across the economy.
Now it's not just governments that want to know that,
because it's also Alibaba, or Wechat or Tencent I should say.
They also want to know what's going on.
They also want to know what's going on with their customers.
And some people argue that if you were to combine information from Facebook and
Amazon and Uber, Airbnb, they've put that information together,
you'd know a lot more about people than the government does.
And in China we have large organizations that offer similar services and
they know a lot, the government would like to share in some of that knowledge.
And so one of the interesting restrictions in China about security and
regulation is we'd like to be able to have a back door into
financial service firms into financial transactions so
we can look for terrorist activities, money laundering,
security and maybe tax fraud or other fraud kinds of compliance.
Of course, once the government get's a back door into financial systems,
they may want to know more.
And you may not know when they know enough or too much.
But so there's sort of some overlapping of government and
private enterprise in China.
Which you may find objectionable and maybe reasons to start a trade war or
do something else crazy.