News Analysis The world’s understanding of China increasingly resembles the old Soviet Union joke: the authorities pretend they are paying wages, workers pretend they are working. China blocking basic business data threatens to shut them off from the world even more. For years, as China printed unreliable economic data, changed it whimsically, or censored it altogether, investors were content to carry on pretending in the unrequited hopes of economic payoff. The new data security law, however, has changed everything. Despite its deserved reputation as strict police chief, Chinese regulators more often resemble the bumbling Keystone Cops. Founded in 2012, ride-hailing app Didi did not receive its first business license until 2017 when it was already doing billions in revenue annually, and processing hundreds and thousands of rides daily. For years, Chinese regulators took a similarly lax approach to all the data being hoovered up by tech firms, like Didi, about …