China's market regulator, the State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR), recently imposed administrative penalties on five community group buying enterprises for unfair price competition.

The SMAR fined Didi-owned Chengxin Youxuan, Pinduoduo's Duo Duo Maicai, Meituan Select, and Nicetuan 1.5 million yuan ($230,000) each, and that of Shixianghui 500,000 yuan. Nicetuan and Shixianghui is respectively backed by Alibaba and Tencent.

China kicked off a new round of anti-monopoly regulations targeting the fast-growing digital economy, with the new rules issued by the State Council in February. 

The new guidelines encourage business operators engaging in the online platform economy to report any monopolistic moves, which is seen as a market-oriented approach that uses peer-pressure to force monopoly out.

Analysts said the guidelines are putting new pressure on the country's leading internet services providers and regulating some of their payment services, such as Ant Group's Alipay and Tencent's WeChat Pay.

Additionally, the rules ban the internet platforms from forcing e-business owners to pick one from two, which has been a long-time practice in the market.

China's central bank also took measures to counter monopolistic practices in online lending.

The central bank's involvement is due to the concerns of potential large credit expansion in the future, Fullerton Research's Chief Strategist Jimmy Zhu told CGTN. 

The moves aim to spread the risks regarding consumers' credit and data so that not a single online lending platform will bear all the credit risk, and consumers' credit data will not fall into just a few companies.

The regulations will soothe potential risks in the financial system in the future, preventing cases of "too big to fail", what happened in Wall Street in the past, Zhu said. 

In the long run, those anti-monopoly policies are good for stock prices, even for the big companies, Zhu said. If the industry is highly monopolized, the industry's potential growth will also be very limited in the future, so that it won't be that attractive for fund managers, he explained.

China's moves against monopoly are in line with international practices, Shang Xixue, deputy director of Cyber Law Institute from China University of Political Science and Law, told CGTN.

When asked about how to balance anti-monopoly and innovation, Shang explained that the purpose of antitrust is to promote enough competition in the market to drive companies to innovate constantly. "It is not conflicting."

However, while ensuring that the new monopoly behaviors brought by new technologies are within the scope of supervision, it is necessary to reduce the impact of policies on enterprises' enthusiasm for technological innovation, she said.

"In order to better deal with the relationship between innovation and anti-monopoly, we should promote high-tech enterprises regard innovation capacity as the core consideration in its development," Shang said.