Feng Shixin’s looking for a job if you’re hiring.

His resume includes a long stint as a mid-level bureaucrat in China, where he was director of press and publications at the Communist Party’s publicity department.

That department is in charge of regulating China’s sprawling online gaming culture, which top officials in Beijing worry is deleterious to social well-being.

Over the years, the Party endeavored to curb gaming addiction in China and Feng was dispatched to explain that push during public speaking engagements. In 2018, 2019 and 2020, he delivered keynote addresses at the country’s annual gaming industry conference.

On Friday, December 22, the last Hong Kong trading session before a four-day holiday weekend, China’s National Press and Publication Administration agency, presumably with Feng’s blessing, blindsided markets with the publication of new draft rules which, among other things, would establish limits on in-game spending and prohibit some incentives designed to facilitate player engagement.

Gaming-related stocks plunged in Hong Kong, chief among them Tencent, which suffered its largest single-session wipeout since the financial crisis.

A few days later, China approved more than 100 games in an apparent effort to placate markets, but the damage was done. The draft rules rekindled investors’ worst fears and the timing of their release seemed almost spiteful — as if the the Party wanted to deliver one last “fuck you” to markets at the tail-end of another bad year for Chinese equities.

Tencent has recovered, but not entirely. It’s still trading below levels seen just before the new rules were announced.

On Wednesday, Reuters and SCMP reported that Feng lost his job over the debacle. My guess is that Feng was a fall guy. Xi screwed up, again, and wanted to hand the markets someone’s head. Figuratively, in the case, although Xi’ll go literal on that if you push your luck.

Feng was “removed last week,” Reuters said, citing five sources who couldn’t be named for reasons I hope are obvious. Reuters was unable to reach anyone at the State Council information office for comment. The same linked coverage dryly noted that Feng’s contact details were unavailable.

For their part, SCMP said the “long-serving” Feng stepped down in what one source called “a sign that China may walk back” the in-game spending limits which markets viewed as “severe.”

Feng’s ouster was a testament to “the importance of shielding financial markets from being whipsawed by haphazard government policies,” SCMP‘s coverage, which featured a rather amusing picture of a Chinese man wielding two joysticks while wearing a VR headset over a COVID mask, went on.

The irony seemed lost on SCMP, and it was surely lost on the Party: Firing Feng paradoxically underscores the notion that the Party is capricious, mercurial and, just as concerning, maladroit and ham-handed to the point of farcical ineptitude.