Beijing’s residents will be prohibited from possessing, storing or transporting a drone and its main parts within the city, as of November 15. The rules, which will go into effect on Nov. 15 and come from the Chinese capital, prohibit the possession or storage of UAVs and ban flights over the city, while also barring the transportation of drones and parts into the country's capital. Persons and companies who still have a device that falls outside of that date will be confiscated and fined.

Notably, a soft landing is provided in the order: that the owners are being offered subsidies for selling their machines in designated buyback sites, scrapping them or shipping them out of the city before the deadline, with the payments capped at 3,000 yuan ($447) per machine. The narrower, more immediate measure kicks in this Sunday (September 20) in most cases barring non-essential flights in the capital and area around it, but not commercial flights or emergency rescue operations.

All this is triggered 80-odd storeys up. The new rules are following a crash in June in which a small plane crashed into China's tallest building, Citic Tower (China Zun), killing the pilot. Local authorities in Chaoyang district have said it was not a drone but a light sport aircraft with only two seats and an engine, which crashed into the tower on the evening of June 26, injuring 13 people in the process of the crash. That distinction is important, as Beijing's authorities have been armed with a crash on a manned aircraft as justification for the strictest civilian drone regime in the world, and have been talking about low altitude control for a very long time, and not just since June.

The November rules aren't the first measures Beijing has taken to address this, which is why it seems more like a ratchet. A previous order, issued in May, had already restricted the sale and rental of drones throughout the city, and demanded that all drones be registered under real names, that they be limited to an area of approximately 883 square miles within the Sixth Ring Road and that 17 key components in addition to the drones themselves be registered. However, the previous laws already banned the sale of drones and required owners to be registered. What November brings is the end of the possession ban, which created a loophole that allowed those who purchased a drone prior to May to continue to fly or at least own a drone. The updated rules have been published on the city's government website, and will be enforced statewide. The officials are also extending the radius outwards: there will be an extension of the controls to extend 300 kilometres from Beijing, and the newspaper says all of Beijing is controlled airspace.

That economics is the real meat of the process, though, as Beijing is not prohibiting another product. The world's civilian drones are almost exclusively built by China, and one company, founded in a dorm room in Shenzhen 20 years ago, dominates the civilian market with about four-fifths of sales, even in areas where efforts are underway to ban them. Domestically, the drone economy is now a policy priority in its own right: The "low-altitude economy" is now featured in the country's national five-year plans with a value of north of three trillion yuan by 2035; and the country's own industry ministry reported that at the beginning of this year, there were more than five million drones in active civilian usage across more than a thousand registered manufacturers. This year, it's about a market worth $9 to $10 billion, projected to more than double by the mid-'30s and Beijing just turned off the largest single consumer catchment in this market for one of the nation's one-tier-one cities with a population of 22 million.

The industry has been working for the past two years to absorb restrictions on exports from overseas, and the domestic restrictions come at a bad time. Tightening market access in foreign countries is not the only challenge manufacturers are facing in the region now, the region's own capital is considering that ownership is a liability, not an asset. Observers of the industry believe the impact has not been a prohibition on the technology, but a re-direction of it, with consumer purchases and even some manufacturing decisions staying out of the capital. Commercial, agricultural and industrial applications in other parts of the country have, so far, been pretty much unhindered. The split, which was tight in the capital but loose elsewhere, is a reflection of this being a city-specific security calculation and not a verdict on the technology and the industry that creates it.

It's also important to note that Beijing has carried out such a move before, following a long trend of pre-emptive airspace closures the city had undertaken in the past, including a blanket ban on sales on major e-commerce platforms and a flying ban, which banned hobbyist model aircraft flying within 300 kilometres of Tiananmen Square, for weeks around major state events like military parades. The difference this time is that it is not temporary, but permanent.

The earlier limitations were tied to a specific parade or ceremony and set to expire after the event. In fact, the November rule has no expiry date, and that's where the determination will come from: will it be a blueprint to be adopted by other Chinese cities or a one-off solution to a one-off event that saw the populace of 22 million residents withering from the shock of an otherwise routine flight being disrupted by a tower attack?