The majority of these stakes do not actually equate to golden shares: To date, CIIF’s investments in ByteDance, Weibo, Kuaishou, and Full Truck Alliance have been confirmed or reported as being golden shares. In January, the CIIF also took out golden shares in Alibaba subsidiary Guangzhou Lujiao, a powerful firm whose portfolio includes streaming service Youku and mobile browser UCWeb. Chinese regulators have also discussed taking out golden shares in a Tencent subsidiary.

“It is not easy to know the precise number of firms that have special management shares, because it can be difficult to determine the rights attributed to specific investments,” says Curtis Milhaupt, a corporate governance professor at Stanford Law School. “But as far as we know, the number of golden share investments is quite limited, and specifically applies to data-oriented internet platform companies.”

Still, for the firms that do have golden share investments, having a government official on the board is a major change given the powers they have to veto decisions.