There's ways to invest in stocks that are not cheating, for example.
Or, you know, they might have done what I myself am doing right now and be landlords. That's not cheating. Or at least, I don't think it is, I don't know what the Chinese government considers it to be, what with communism and all.
For this context: cheating is in the sense of "large bets where the cost of failure will be paid by the state and yet they get to keep the profits in the event of success": I think that if any of them have made such bets, those bets have paid off. I think that if any such bet had been made and failed, it would have been noticed by people outside China.
As I said:
From the outside, it appears that "upset the regime" includes "cheating your way into profits".
Key parts: "from the outside", and "appears".
In the event they make a bet and it fails and we spot it, that specific chain is what would make it cease to "appear" to be so "from the outside".
