“Fight the Landlord” is one of the most popular card games in China. The name comes from the 1950s, when the Chinese Communist Party confiscated property from landowners, often violently, in the name of the masses. As many as two million people were killed.

China’s state-controlled media is playing a new game of “Fight the Landlord,” and its target is one of the biggest landlords in the world: the 91-year-old Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing. Hong Kong’s summer of protests stems mainly from sky-high housing costs, China’s media argues, and Mr. Li and other local real estate tycoons should be held responsible.

“In the current chaotic situation in Hong Kong, many young people are venting their dissatisfaction with high housing prices and expensive rents at the government,” said an official commentary by the party’s Central Political and Legal Affairs Commission, which oversees China’s police and courts. “They’re probably blaming the wrong target.”

The return of “Fight the Landlord” lays bare the Communist Party’s shifting attitudes toward the business world. Hong Kong’s property tycoons were once big beneficiaries of an unspoken pact between Beijing and business: They could wheel and deal as they liked, so long as they helped China achieve its economic dreams and left the politics to the Communist Party.