For nearly two years, a crackdown under President Xi Jinping’s banner of “common prosperity” has brought a clutch of China’s biggest companies to heel and reasserted the Communist party’s control over the country’s tycoons.

But a stark change of rhetoric from policymakers in recent months, including vice-premier and top economic official Liu He and premier Li Keqiang, has stoked hopes a regulatory storm that has wiped trillions of dollars off the value of Chinese companies may be close to ending.