There are many eye-popping aspects to Ant Group’s plans for a blockbuster public listing in China this week, not least its dramatic last-minute suspension by the Shanghai stock exchange. The saga shows both how capitalist China has become and how Communist it remains.

One of the most astonishing things about Ant is that it took just 16 years for a payments app invented by the Alibaba ecommerce platform to develop separately into one of the world’s most dynamic digital finance companies. Ant’s indicative market valuation of about $300bn had put it roughly on a par with the venerable JPMorgan Chase.

Yet the latest episode has also shown how even a billionaire businessman as influential as Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba and Ant’s biggest shareholder, remains subject to the dictates of the Chinese Communist party. Chinese regulators do not appear to have taken kindly to Mr Ma’s public comments last month that red tape was stifling innovation. This week they hauled him and his top team in for “supervisory interviews” and halted Ant’s flotation.