Our cover this week examines President Xi Jinping’s assault on China’s $4trn tech industry. Chinese regulators have mounted over 50 actions against scores of firms for a dizzying array of alleged offences, from antitrust abuses to data violations, costing investors around $1trn. Mr Xi’s immediate goal may be to humble tycoons and give regulators more sway over unruly digital markets. But the Communist Party’s deeper ambition is to redesign the industry so as to sharpen its country’s technological edge while boosting competition and benefiting consumers. In this, it echoes many of the concerns that motivate regulators and politicians in the West: that digital markets tend towards monopolies and that tech firms hoard data, abuse suppliers, exploit workers and undermine public morality. China is about to become a policy laboratory in which an unaccountable state wrestles with the world’s biggest firms for control of the 21st century’s essential infrastructure.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released the first part of its latest assessment report. The Earth is warming. Even with a drastic reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions temperatures will probably be 1.5°C above their late-19th century levels by 2050. Climate change is under way, the report laments, with all the environmental consequences that brings. The extent of the damage depends on the cumulative build-up of emissions and can be limited if the world strives for net-zero carbon emissions.

Son Masayoshi, the boss of SoftBank, said he was curbing his conglomerate’s enthusiasm to invest in Chinese startups until the extent of the Chinese government’s crackdown on the tech industry becomes clearer in the coming years. The Japanese company is a big investor in Alibaba and Didi Global, two targets of the ire of regulators in Beijing.