Available evidence indicates that China did not move from its 2021–2022 tech and data regulatory push to cancel the VIE structures underpinning major Chinese internet/tech platforms; instead, it formally legalized and regulated them.

1. Regulators explicitly chose to allow VIEs rather than cancel them.

   • In late 2021 and 2023, the China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC) issued draft and then final rules on overseas listings. These rules do not ban VIEs; rather, they put VIE-structured overseas listings under a filing regime and state that companies with VIE structures that meet compliance requirements are eligible to list overseas after filing.(cnbc.com)
   • Law-firm and regulatory summaries note that VIEs are now expressly included in the CSRC filing system and are “no longer a grey-area scheme,” signalling regulatory acceptance rather than cancellation.(investmentlawwatch.com)

2. Major tech companies using VIEs remain listed and operating via those structures.

   • The largest Chinese tech firms that rely on VIE structures for overseas listings—such as Alibaba, JD.com, Baidu and others—remain listed on U.S. and/or Hong Kong exchanges as of 2025. There has been political pressure in the U.S. to delist some of them on national security grounds, but that is a U.S. capital-markets issue, not China canceling their VIEs.(cnbc.com)
   • The new Chinese rules apply prospectively via filings and compliance reviews; they do not retroactively invalidate or force unwinding of the core VIE structures for these major tech platforms.(mayerbrown.com)

3. Where VIE-related prohibitions did occur, they were sector-specific (education), not a broad tech‑platform move.

   • In July 2021, China’s "Double Reduction"/education crackdown barred foreign capital from controlling or participating in curriculum-based tutoring businesses via VIE arrangements, and required any violations to be rectified.(sec.gov)
   • This effectively killed the VIE-based, for‑profit K‑12 tutoring model (e.g., New Oriental, TAL), but that is a targeted ban in the education sector, not the broader "most important" tech platforms that were the focus of investors’ VIE concerns (internet platforms like Alibaba, Tencent, Meituan, etc.).

Because the Chinese government’s post‑2021 regulatory trajectory normalized and regulated VIEs for major tech companies instead of canceling them, the core forecast that new tech/data rules were a prelude to canceling those VIE structures has not materialized. The narrow education‑sector VIE ban is too limited and sector‑specific to count as the predicted broader move against major tech VIEs.

On balance, this prediction is wrong.