Ant Group challenged China’s state-dominated banking system by bringing easy-to-use payments, borrowing and investing to hundreds of millions of smartphones across the country. On Tuesday, Chinese officialdom reminded the company who was really in charge.

In a late-evening announcement that stunned China, the Shanghai Stock Exchange slammed the brakes on Ant’s initial public offering, which was set to be the biggest stock debut in history with investors on multiple continents and at least $34 billion in proceeds.

The stock exchange’s notice to Ant said that the company’s proposed offering might no longer meet the requirements for listing after Chinese regulators had summoned company executives, including Jack Ma, the co-founder of the e-commerce titan Alibaba and Ant’s controlling shareholder, for a meeting on Monday.

Neither the regulators nor Ant has said in detail what was discussed at the meeting. But the timing of the conversation, mere days before Ant’s shares were expected to begin trading concurrently in Shanghai and Hong Kong, suggested discord with the company or with Mr. Ma, who spun Ant out of Alibaba in 2011.

Though he is not part of Ant’s management, Mr. Ma has been a spirited champion for the company’s mission of bringing financial services to small businesses and others in China who he says have been ill served by stodgy, government-run institutions.

Shortly after the Shanghai exchange’s announcement, Ant said it was suspending the Hong Kong leg of its listing as well. The company apologized to investors “for any inconvenience.”

“We will keep in close communications with the Shanghai Stock Exchange and relevant regulators,” the company said, “and wait for their further notice with respect to further developments of our offering and listing process.”

Shares of Alibaba, a major Ant shareholder, fell 8 percent on the New York Stock Exchange on Tuesday.

Over the past decade, Ant has transformed the way people in China interact with money. The company’s Alipay app has become an essential payment tool for more than 730 million users, as well as a platform for obtaining small loans and buying insurance and investment products.

But competing against China’s politically connected financial institutions always came with risks. Regulators have looked warily upon Ant’s fast growth in certain areas, fearful it might become too big to rescue in the event of a meltdown.

Ant has pivoted in response. Instead of using its own money to extend loans, the company now primarily acts as an agent for banks, introducing them to individual borrowers and small enterprises that they might not otherwise reach. It describes itself as a technology partner to banks, not a competitor or a disrupter.

This business model works just fine for many of Ant’s investors, evidently. The company’s expected market valuation after the dual listing, more than $310 billion, would make it worth more than many global banks. Mr. Ma, already China’s richest man, would become even richer.

Still, Ant’s future remains at the mercy of Chinese regulators, whose views on the melding of tech and finance are still evolving.

“The regulators have long been looking at the risks in this area and how it should be regulated, but it’s all suddenly coming out at this specific time,” said Yu Baicheng, head of the Zero One Research Institute, a think tank in Beijing focused on finance and tech. “It’s definitely a statement of the regulators’ attitude.”

An article on the website of Economic Daily, an official Communist Party newspaper, praised the decision to suspend Ant’s share sale, calling it in the best interest of investors.

“Every market participant must respect and revere the rules — no exceptions,” the article said.

Besides Mr. Ma, the meeting on Monday with the regulatory agencies included Ant’s executive chairman, Eric Jing, and its chief executive, Simon Hu. “Views regarding the health and stability of the financial sector were exchanged,” Ant said in a statement.

In another sign of the continuing scrutiny, the nation’s banking regulator, the China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission, issued new draft rules on Monday for online microfinance businesses. Among them were higher capital requirements for loans and tighter controls on lending across provincial lines.

The Shanghai exchange’s suspension of the Ant I.P.O. appeared to take note of the draft rules, saying that recent changes in the regulatory environment had affected Ant significantly. Bai Chengyu, an executive at the China Association of Microfinance, said the new rules could cause the entire microfinance industry to shrink.

The famously outspoken Mr. Ma did not ingratiate himself with the authorities when he said, in a recent speech in Shanghai, that financial regulators’ excessive focus on containing risk could stifle innovation.

“We cannot manage an airport the way we managed a train station,” he said. “We cannot use yesterday’s methods to manage the future.”

The head of consumer protection at China’s banking regulator, Guo Wuping, slapped back on Monday, calling out two popular features in Alipay by name in a sharply critical article in 21st Century Business Herald, a government-owned newspaper.

Mr. Guo argued that online finance products were not fundamentally different from traditional ones, and that financial technology companies should therefore be regulated in the same way as established institutions.

Huabei, a credit function in Alipay, is no different from a credit card issued by a bank, Mr. Guo wrote. And Jiebei, an Alipay loan feature, is no different from a bank loan. Ant has called Huabei and Jiebei the most widely used consumer credit products in China.

Loose regulation has allowed financial technology companies to charge higher fees than banks, Mr. Guo wrote. This, he said, “has caused some low-income people and young people to fall into debt traps, ultimately harming consumers’ rights and interests and even endangering families and society.”

Ant declined to comment on Mr. Guo’s article.

Over the past few years, an increasing number of people in Hong Kong and mainland China have come to realise that gender is not a black-and-white matter. While the majority of people still identify as either male or female, not everyone fits into those two categories. Non-binary individuals may have a gender that blends male and female or experience a gender that changes over time; others may not identify with any gender.

As our understanding of gender evolves, so does the language we use to describe it. In English, some non-binary people use pronouns such as ‘they/them’ or ‘zim/zir’ to refer to themselves. In 2019, Merriam-Webster named ‘they’ the Word of the Year in 2019, while the Oxford English Dictionary added ‘Hir’ and ‘Zir’ to its lexicon, reflecting the widespread usage of gender-neutral, third-person pronouns.

Meanwhile, in Hong Kong and mainland China, the Chinese-speaking transgender community has been experimenting with the introduction of non-binary pronouns as an alternative to gender-specific pronouns, such as 他 (he) and 她 (she). To learn more about this linguistic evolution, we invite advocates in Hong Kong to walk us through the latest developments.

A brief history of China’s gendered pronouns

In contemporary Chinese, the character 他 (pronounced as tā) is specifically associated with men, however, that is a relatively modern construct. For much of Chinese history, the word served as a gender-neutral pronoun, covering feminine, masculine, and neutral pronouns – the equivalent of ‘he’, ‘she’ and ‘it’ in English. In many works of Chinese classic literature, such as 18th-century Dream of the Red Chamber, authors used 他 to describe male and female characters.

Due to increasing linguistic and cultural interactions with the West, a shift took place at the turn of the 20th century. Gradually, Chinese speakers started using 他 to refer to only to men, since the character contains the radical 人 (meaning ‘human’ or ‘man’). In Chinese, a radical is a basic graphical component of a Chinese character that imparts linguistic meaning – not unlike a category or classification in English.

The usage of 她 as a female pronoun did not become prevalent until the 1920s, when the women’s movement in China shed light on women’s independence and individuality. Renowned female writers, such as Bing Xin and Lu Yin, started using 她 in their writing, which was published in fiction journal Fiction Monthly in 1921.

The introduction of the female 她 met controversy, though, because some women felt that it equated women with animals. For instance, women’s publication Women’s Resonance Monthly, released a notice in 1934, which stated: “Using a 人(human) radical [in 他] to represent men, a 女(woman) radical [in 她] to represent women, and a 牛(cow) radical [in 牠] to represent animals is an insult to women because it implies they are not human… we refuse to use the term 她.”

Despite the criticism, 她 eventually gained popularity as a female-specific pronoun and is still widely used today.

Introducing the non-binary ‘X也’

According to Kaspar Wan, founder of grassroots transgender information and support charity Gender Empowerment in Hong Kong, transgender individuals still debate whether it is necessary to create a pronoun for non-binary people who do not identify as 他 (he) or 她 (she).

One example is ‘X也,’ which is a gender-neutral alternative to 他 and 她. Invented in 2015 by an intersex information platform called The Missing Gender 0.972, the word uses the English letter X to represent the non-binary community.

“I found it quite inspiring as it resembles Chinese words,” says Wan, who identifies as a transgender man. He later obtained permission from the platform to create stickers featuring this invented character, which he used to raise awareness about gender issues during a 2017 activism event in Hong Kong.

Though they improve inclusivity, invented characters like X也 pose linguistic and practical challenges. “For instance, how do you type X也 [on a phone or keyboard]? If you cannot type it, then circulation [and adoption] will be limited,” says Joanne Leung, a transgender activist in Hong Kong who identifies as non-binary. “Besides, there are situations where the writers won’t have room to explain to readers how and why an invented pronoun is used.”

As another option, Wan says that some non-binary Hongkongers also welcome the third-person, gender-neutral pronoun, 佢 (pronounced as qú), which is used in spoken form and in informal contexts, such as in tabloids, instant messages or social media.

Re-embracing ‘ta’

Meanwhile, in mainland China, many people are using the pinyin, ta in situations where a person’s gender remains unknown or irrelevant.

“Nobody knows when it started but, at one point, some people in mainland China came to realise that 他 and 她 represent male and female characters, so they started to use ta in Chinese sentences to be more inclusive,” explains Leung. “Some mainstream companies including China Central Television and JDB Group [a beverage manufacturer] are also using ta in their advertisements or Weibo posts when gender is irrelevant,” says Leung.

Although this phrase is less common in Hong Kong, Leung chooses to use ta because it is a more inclusive option. For instance, the activist used this gender-neutral pronoun when writing The Book of Transgender in Hong Kong: Gossip Boys & Girls, a guidebook for transgender people which Leung published in 2012. “[We] hope to remind everyone that respect for people’s gender expression and identity can be demonstrated through the language that we use,” Leung wrote in the footnote of the book.

When writing articles or op-eds for media publications tailored for the general public, Leung often uses 他 along with a brief explanation that this pronoun does not indicate a specific gender. “Why can’t we make people understand that 他 was originally a gender-neutral pronoun? If we keep arguing about the binary 他 and 她, we are actually falling back into the ideology of patriarchy.”

Wan adds that many of his non-binary friends feel comfortable being referred to as 他 in Chinese, especially those who were assigned female at birth.

“They understand that 他 was originally gender-neutral,” he explains. “Also, for transgender Hongkongers, the most important thing is to acknowledge that their gender identity is different from their assigned sex. If we don’t impose a 她 (she) on them, that is already a recognition of their gender identity.”

A colossal 1,200-ton bronze statue of Chinese warrior-god Guan Yu that enjoyed a brief bout of global notoriety in 2016 will be moved from its current location in a park in the ancient central city of Jingzhou, according to local officials.

The announcement comes a little over a month after China’s Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development ordered the “rectification” of the statue, saying it “ruined Jingzhou’s historical character and culture.”

The 58-meter-tall monument to China’s best-known war god — touted by developers as the largest bronze statue in the world — was built as part of a boom in mammoth statuary in China over the past decade. When it was first unveiled in 2016, it went viral both in China and abroad for its massive scale. With characteristic melodrama, British tabloid The Sun labeled it a “monument of war,” while science magazine Popular Mechanics said it “might be the most epic statue of all time.”

But epic or not, Jingzhou officials plan to give the Guan Yu statue its marching orders. A media outlet run by Jingzhou’s information office posted a vague announcement yesterday saying the Guan Yu statue would be relocated as a “rectification” measure, and that experts had been invited to help figure out how and where to move it.

In an explainer untangling the kerfuffle, state broadcaster CCTV wrote Saturday that when the local developers behind the statue applied for permission to build it in 2014, they only asked for permission to build its base: the boat-shaped museum the statue strides across like a surfboard.

The developers say they considered the statue to be a work of art — and that local officials never told them large statues require their own planning process, or that its location broke rules limiting the maximum height of structures in Jingzhou’s ancient city to 15 meters.

“We misrecognized, and had a flawed understanding of, the issues at the time,” Qin Jun, a director in Jingzhou’s planning bureau, admitted in an interview with CCTV. “We didn’t know enough about the approval procedures related to large-scale sculptures.”

Mega-statues have been all the rage in China over the past decade — mostly Buddhas, but also historical figures, goddesses, full-sized Sphinxes, and even a giant Marylin Monroe.

Often, as is the case with the giant Guan Yu, they were built to promote tourism and justified by links — however tenuous — between the location and the statue’s subject.

More recently, however, many of these projects have been criticized for falling foul of state planning guidelines or campaigns against wastefulness. Earlier this year, netizens complained about a 12 million yuan ($1.8 million) statue of a local deity built in an impoverished county in the southwestern Guizhou province.

Still, some officials are willing to gamble on the potential of a signature statue to raise their jurisdiction’s profile. In September, officials in the northern potato production center of Ulanqab were roundly mocked after they unveiled designs for a titanic tuber sculpture.

LINXIA, China — The morning ritual began as dozens of men filed quietly into mosques in traditional white skullcaps, nodding to one another in the chill of an autumn twilight. But there was no call to prayer. Another less spiritual message flashed silently in red characters on a screen across from one of the mosques: “STRENGTHEN ETHNIC UNITY, MAINTAIN SOCIAL STABILITY.” Surveillance cameras swiveled at the sign’s two sides. The men passed by them to praise god.

The rising sun revealed that the domes and minarets on the city’s three grand mosques, each home to a different Islamic sect of the Hui people, a Chinese Muslim minority, had been snapped apart and scooped away. Bamboo scaffolding had been put up for renovations that would further strip the mosques of their identities.

Here in the minority heartland of northwestern China’s Gansu province, a social engineering initiative that offers improved livelihoods while demanding a shift from religious to political devotion is underway. It lies at the intersection of two nationwide campaigns: the “Sinicization of religion” to erase foreign influence and bring religion under state control, and the eradication of poverty through mass resettlement, job training and sending cadres into villages to teach the Communist Party’s will.

The campaigns are signature designs of Chinese leader Xi Jinping. They are reshaping a land of red mountains and minarets, filled with minority languages and faiths born of ancient mingling on the Silk Road. Their aim is to mold a future patterned after Han-majority China, with urban jobs, material dreams, and strengthened loyalties to the party and its leader.

Three men walking out of mosques in Linxia, a city once nicknamed “Little Mecca” for its many Islamic communities, separately confirmed that the religious buildings had been partially demolished while many people remained indoors during the COVID-19 pandemic. The domes and minarets built in “Arab” or “Saudi” style were to be replaced with Chinese-style roofs meant to promote a more “Sinicized” version of Islam.

“It just happened all of a sudden,” said Ma Hassan, 36, a local hotel businessman. “They came up with this policy of de-Saudi-ification, de-Arabization, and that was it. We accepted it — how could we not? The government decided.”

“They’re controlling us,” said Ma Zhongxian, 55, a local Hui businessman who had attended morning prayers, “but mostly the next generation will be affected. They will probably lose their faith, or it will be diluted.”

Adults had relative freedom to worship, he said, but Communist Party cadres, following new state guidelines, sat outside the mosques to ensure no minors entered for Friday prayers. Summer religion and Arabic schools once attended by many Hui children were banned. The call to prayer was forbidden as a “public nuisance,” Ma said, despite Muslims making up 60% of Linxia’s population.

A Times reporter visited the damaged mosques during a government-organized tour of Gansu to showcase poverty alleviation efforts. The mosques were not part of the itinerary. But a Linxia propaganda official confirmed that they had received orders from the central government to combat “Arab-ization, Saudi-ization, and pan-Islamification” in Gansu, and to restrict mosque-building and participation in the hajj, an annual Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca.

“We are worried about foreign infiltration and religious extremism. That’s a global phenomenon,” said the official, who asked not to be named because he was not supposed to discuss the new religious controls. No extremist attacks or activity had happened in Linxia, he said. But the policy was preemptive and came from Beijing.

Officials’ approach to Gansu appears more relaxed than in neighboring Xinjiang, where Uighur minority Muslims have been detained en masse for forced “reeducation,” then either moved to prisons or shipped to low-wage factories for offenses including growing beards, having family members abroad or installing WhatsApp on their phones. Many holy sites there have been razed rather than refurbished with “Chinese” trappings.

In a “poverty alleviation factory” on the outskirts of Linxia, rows of women — some wearing hijabs, all in uniforms and face masks — sewed shoe interiors together and packed them in boxes. An official spoke proudly of how the factory had “transformed people’s thinking” and provided income to conservative housewives who traditionally rarely left their homes.

One of the Hui factory workers, Mafutumai, 30, said her thoughts had been “transformed.” She had stopped attending school after age 13 and married at 18. She had done only housework for the last 15 years. “Religious thinking” had taught her that women should stay home, but now she was making roughly $380 a month, which she liked.

At the same time, she said she was proud to fast during Ramadan and wear her hijab at the factory. If the bosses asked her to remove it, she would resist. “I’m Hui and that’s who I am,” she said. “I wear hijab and that’s what I do.”

The factory manager, Song Wenkai, 39, hailed from Xiamen, a wealthy coastal city in southern China where his company had been manufacturing shoes for 20 years. Xiamen and Linxia were part of a government initiative linking Eastern and Western cities and subsidizing factories to open branches in poor parts of China like Gansu, he said.

The factory in Linxia paid no rent or electricity fees but was not turning a profit. The workers were less efficient than Xiamen’s workers, but he paid them half the salary and did not provide social benefits. Rising wages and stricter enforcement of labor laws in eastern China had already pushed many factories to move to Southeast Asia in recent years. It made sense for Song’s company to move to minority regions in western China instead; he said he could keep the supply chain domestic, use cheaper labor and fulfill a “political duty.”

“It will get better in the long term,” Song said. “The labor is plentiful and the government is helping.”

Such government help — and thought reform — is also reaching into villages like Bulengou, part of the Dongxiang region, home to a Muslim minority of just over 600,000 people. Descended from Mongols who intermarried with Central Asians, Dongxiang people are one of the poorest groups in China, with historically low literacy rates and difficulty farming and herding sheep in mountain villages.

They speak a Mongolic tongue interspersed with Mandarin, Persian, Arabic and Turkic words, a testament to the people who once passed through this remote pocket of Gansu.

On the road approaching Bulengou, two icons towered over the village: a gongbei, an old Islamic-Chinese religious structure in rusty shades of red and blue, and a bright red billboard quoting Xi Jinping. The gongbei was enclosed behind a padlocked gate, with a sign forbidding photos. The Xi billboard welcomed visitors to a museum honoring Xi’s visit to the village in 2013, with images and video of grateful Muslims flocking to see the party leader.

Inside, a Dongxiang man posed with running water from a faucet printed with the slogan: “Drink water while thinking of the General Secretary/Give thanks to the Communist Party forever.” State media reporters crowded around, snapping photos as a cadre told the man how to position his hands.

Every villager had been given an identical faucet as part of the poverty alleviation drive, which had also brought smooth roads, relocations to new homes and job training. The improvements transformed the village — while cadres transformed villagers’ thoughts.

Yang Cheng, a cadre from Xiamen who’d been sent from state-owned oil and gas company Sinopec to work in Bulengou since January 2019, explained that his primary job was grass-roots party-building. He educated the villagers on party policies and trained new, younger party members who would renounce their religion when they joined, in accordance with party rules. So far there were 19 party members out of 315 villagers, he said.

“They have this problem because they grew up in this environment. But once you’re absorbed in the party, you give that up to follow party rules. You become a leader,” he said. In recent years, local schools had enforced strict Mandarin teaching and forbade students to participate in religious activities like fasting during Ramadan, he said: “The children have no religious education now.”

Inside one of the new Dongxiang homes, a woman named Maruru, 67, spoke Dongxiang to her 3-year-old grandson, Hassan. His older siblings all switched to Mandarin once they started school. They would probably forget Dongxiang altogether before long, she said.

But Maruru was more worried about money. She had two older grandchildren in school in Linxia and Lanzhou who needed nearly $100 a week for living expenses. Her daughter-in-law was making $9 a day embroidering in a poverty alleviation project. Her son was a migrant worker earning about $27 a day. It wasn’t enough, she said.

Her husband, Mawumaile, 72, agreed. “We don’t have any culture. We just want to have enough to eat,” he said. He had grown up in the mountains herding sheep and never attended school. All he wanted now was for his grandchildren to have an education and a future. A party cadre sat in the room, listening and nodding as he spoke.

But when Mawumaile was asked about the gongbei, he sat up and puffed out his chest. “That tower has been here for a thousand years! It was brought by our Arab ancestors. It is a sign of our people,” he said as the cadre pursed his lips.

Hints of that pride in heritage remain even among some government workers. On a car ride with a Times reporter through the mountains around Bulengou, on a road so new there were no lights, Ma Fei, 30, a Dongxiang employee of the local propaganda department, spoke of how he taught Dongxiang to his son at home. “This language will be lost very soon,” he said.

Growing up, he remembered drinking melted snow and rainwater in his village home. The changes in recent years were good, he said, but had brought new questions about how to live — and whether some things from their previous lives should be preserved.

“In the past our biggest worry was whether we had enough potatoes. Now I can make money and change my own life,” he said. With the choices of modern, urban life flooding toward the region, he was glad to still have Islam as a guide. Some people associated religion with terror and extremism, he said, but they were wrong.

“Religion is not dangerous at all, especially among our people,” he said. “It cannot hurt our country’s interests.”

At a vocational school for Dongxiang students, another Xi Jinping quote was printed on the walls: “All happiness comes through struggle!” His message seemed to have convinced the dozens of Dongxiang youth who were receiving training to become beef noodle chefs or makeup artists. A row of teenagers stood in chef’s hats, aprons and face masks, practicing flipping their woks. Most had not made good enough grades to attend high school. Several of them said they didn’t speak Dongxiang.

Their ancestral language was not relevant to their dreams, they said, which were to get jobs in big cities, make something of themselves, and send money back home. One of the teens, Ma Guodong, 18, posted selfies in his chef’s hat and a video of him cooking on WeChat with motivational quotes: “As long as you work hard enough, the sun will shine through thick clouds into your life” and “Failure is not as bad as not trying. Everyone has a process of striving…”

While language and religion are fading from the newly “Sinicized” generation, the older faithful have endured in quiet. Back in Linxia, Ma Zhongxian, the businessman, said he had visited Xinjiang last year and seen stricter restrictions on religious dress and entrance to mosques, and a far stronger security state.

“We are not as bad as them yet,” he said, though he suspected Gansu could soon go in the same direction. Local officials were already saying they needed to Sinicize Muslims for “security reasons.”

“Hui, Dongxiang, everyone is the same. They’re controlling us, not just in Linxia, but in the whole country,” he said. “Of course I am afraid, but what can I do? This is the nation’s trajectory.”

All he could do was to keep his own faith. He would walk past the minaret stumps at noon and pray again.

A sexual harassment case against a powerful Chinese media figure has begun in Beijing, with his accuser calling it a major moment in the country’s nascent #Me Too! movement.

Zhou Xiaoxuan prompted a social media storm in 2018 when she accused the prominent television host Zhu Jun of groping and forcibly kissing her when she was an intern at the state broadcaster CCTV.

China’s first civil code, passed in May, expanded the definition of sexual harassment, but many women are still reluctant to come forward and it is rare for cases like this to make it to court.

“I’m very nervous,” Zhou told AFP before Wednesday’s hearing. “But whether we win or lose the case, it has meaning. If we lose, it allows the questions we raised at least to remain in history. Someone will have to give us an answer.”

Crowds gathered outside the Haidian people’s court in a rare show of political activism. Attendees held signs calling for answers, and offering support to Zhou. According to local media, police requested they stop showing their placards and appeared to forcibly remove at least one reporter.

Yang Ruiqi, a third-year university student, had been waiting since midday outside the court to show support for Zhou. “I saw people holding slogans to support Xianzi, I felt excited and moved to see people here to support each other,” Yang told the Guardian.

“The whole #MeToo movement is an inspiration to me, making me realise that things which made me feel uncomfortable before were wrong, it wasn’t because I was being too sensitive.”

Zhou, now 27, alleges she found herself alone in a dressing room with Zhu in 2014, and that he groped her after asking if she wanted to continue to work for the channel after her internship.

Zhu is a former host of the country’s annual spring festival gala – one of the world’s most-watched television programmes – and other major broadcast events. He has denied the allegations and has launched his own court case accusing her of damaging his reputation.

Zhou’s case against Zhu was originally filed under the “personality rights” law, covering rights relating to an individual’s health and body, but her lawyers have asked for it to be considered under the new legislation.

Zhou was among a wave of people who came forward in 2018 when an emerging #MeToo movement rocked China. When she initially reported the case to police, she says she was told that speaking out would affect the image of the state broadcaster where Zhu worked and hurt the feelings of those who admired him.

“These [experiences] make you feel like your existence is very insignificant,” she told AFP.

Many women are reluctant to speak out in China’s conservative society where victims can also face blame. But Zhou has no regrets about launching the case and says that even if it is unsuccessful, she hopes it will encourage more women to speak up.

“Even if I had to experience this all over again, I don’t regret it,” she said. “I think all of this is still meaningful.”