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I travel frequently to China. Didi (Chinese uber) works with foreign cards. nothing else will work. the easiest way to get money on wechat is to "buy money" from someone you trust/know: give them cash and they will send you money through wechat, that you can then use to pay.

You can't accept the money that is sent to you unless you have a bank account.

not true. unless it was like that before. I came back from a trip a few weeks ago and that's how I got money in my wechat account. And I don't have a bank account linked.

edit: to zht's comment, I did have a US cc added.

To clarify, this has recently changed. In 2017 you could not accept money in your WeChat account without a Chinese card or bank account. As of 2018, adding a foreign credit card enables the "money" feature" and allows you to receive funds.

you can link a US issued debit card as a "credit card" under wechat and you can then accept money from others (and also send money from your stored balance)

Correct. I can confirm. This is what I do as well.

That's also the best way to buy bitcoin.

>Ironically I recently realized tourists visiting China >might be victim of this too. If you're coming to China you >won't be able to do much until you open a bank account and >get a local phone number.

Yup, this happened to me just less than a year ago. I spent extended time in Xiamen and I had to open a bank account, get a local phone in order to WeChat verify and also use AliPay. Once I did that it was smooth sailing. Yes, when I returned home all of this was for not. I can't use it unless I return.

Also, even though I had RMB nobody wanted to take them. Often they dont have money for change, etc. My phone was my best friend the entire trip.

I just read a very interesting history book (Before European Hegemony, by Janet Abu-Lughod (sp?)) that said that China was one of the first countries to have paper currency and that as early as like 1100 if I remember correctly, foreign merchants would try to go to the market with gold coins and they would be turned away and told to go trade in their gold for currency.

That's gold. The medium of exchange in China was silver; you could always use that.

If the book I was reading was correct, there was a period of years where all precious metals were required to be taken to a government building and traded for paper currency, though I'm not sure how long it lasted. But you're right about the silver being the main metal in use.

Based just on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Chinese_currency#So... , it doesn't look like that could have happened in 1100. It goes on to say there was a brief window 200 years later when this might have happened:

> The Yuan government attempted to prohibit all transactions in or possession of silver or gold, which had to be turned over to the government.

> Under Külüg Khan the levels of inflation rose to 80% as the government kept printing more banknotes due, and in order to ensure the government’s control on the currency Külüg Khan [r. 1307-1311] banned the usage of silver and gold coins, and stopped the circulation of silver certificates in favour of fiat banknotes. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuan_dynasty_coinage )

But that was a massive failure by a khan who reigned for three and a half years.

Thank you for the research, I was way off! That's quite interesting.

Thinking on it some more, I think her information may have come from something ibn Battuta had written, which matches your time period, and also explains perhaps why she didn't have much to say about how well it worked.

I also think the book was from the late 80's so I wouldn't be surprised if historians have learned much more since then!

You are not wrong. The AD1100 isn't just Yuan Dynasty, it was part of the South Song Dynasty as well, where they invented ( or popularise ) paper back currency.

This is why you’re starting to see services like Swapsy and Megachange. They take USD via PayPal and “convert” or “match” it to RMB in WeChat and Alipay.

I think you’re right though: this is going to be a concern for tourists to China. Maybe that won’t be a concern for the locals or maybe the cashless services will figure out some way to take foreign cash for electronic credits, like these exchange services are doing.

How big is Tourism in China? Quick google tells me 2%?

https://www.statista.com/topics/1210/tourism-industry-in-chi...

China isn't a tropical island country with 75% of income from Tourism. It may be an acceptable risk to inconvenience tourists to have the desired local monetary policy?

The question doesn't really make much sense applied to the whole country, does it? It's more important I think to point out which places are important, and also have high tourism

ie Also quick googling but honk kong apparently has 16% of its income, and 20% in 2014, from tourism[1]. (currently trending downwards, perhaps related to this?) This is also presumably the kind of area where these apps are most important.

I'm also not sure it constitutes desired monetary policy, so much as an accident of natural processes that wasn't stopped. Whether they like it or not, I doubt it was planned, and I doubt it was truly wanted. More like, accepted.

[1] https://knoema.com/atlas/Hong-Kong/topics/Tourism/Travel-and...

Hong Kong is a bad example as cash is still king here and they use the Hong Kong Dollar not RMB. In my experience the locals don't really use wechat either unless they need to talk to people in the mainland.

So once someone gets a local phone number and bank account to open the WeChat and Alipay, they can then use Swapsy/Megachange? Or does Swapsy/Megachange have a way around the local bank account/phone # requirement?

Looks like there are various options for tourists, including using AliPay, which accepts foreign cards, or get a verified WeChat user to send you a special link that lets you add a foreign card:

https://www.quora.com/How-can-tourists-in-China-use-mobile-p...

From memory WeChat verification only allows one verification every few months (and only if your account is old enough). In theory you can get a hostel employee to verify you, but they have usually used up their verification for that quarter.

I tried using Alipay with foreign card a year ago and it didn't work. I had to get a Chinese phone number and Chinese bank debit card to start using Alipay (this proved to be possible even on tourist visa, but only because of a friend who lives there, let me use their address and helped me with the whole process). Hopefully it's changed by now!

AliPay only accepts foreign credit cards for Taobao purchases. You can't use them for in-person purchases; I verified this with Alipay's support team when I found I was being blocked in China.

It's a huge pain. You have to download a specific version of the WeChat app from a Chinese app store and even then it may not work.

> Ironically I recently realized tourists visiting China might be victim of this too. If you're coming to China you won't be able to do much until you open a bank account and get a local phone number.

Just visited China a few weeks ago. While it is not possible to open an AliPay account, you can verify WeChat pay with a foreign CC. You then have a problem of getting RMD actually added into your WeChat wallet; while I worked with a friend to manually transfer currency (Venmo'd him USD, received RMB from him over WeChat), my friend also recommend https://theswapsy.com/.

Warning: WeChat has absolutely terrible customer support compared to Alipay. My account got locked at one point and somehow magically opened up after a few days - I could never get a hold of any CX agent.

Yep. I travel to China frequently and this is a huge pain. There are some moderately useful workarounds you can do, like floating money from a friend in your WeChat Pay. But at the end of the day, you are highly dependent upon people hooked into the native financial infrastructure.

I was just in China a couple months ago, and you can definitely use cash everywhere. But it does help to be with someone who can pay using APP (ay pee pee, that's what they refer to it as)

Where did you go? In Shanghai, there are grocery stores that only take Alipay - even some vending machines only take Alipay (no cash)

Interesting. I wonder how long it will take before currency exchange kiosks in the airport have a straightforward way for visitors to exchange their foreign currency for Chinese currency in an app that can be used for local payments. Definitely not a hard technical problem to solve, though maybe bound to get caught up in political and bureaucratic delays.

Wait, are you suggesting that walled gardens are a terrible idea and the technology sector is going backwards? (Again)

Most of the things you mentioned are theoretically possible without a bank account but you have to find someone willing to send you money on Wechat in exchange for cash. You can also add a foreign credit card on your Wechat or Alipay to buy things online (e.g. Meituan, Taobao, etc.).

If you try to send money on WeChat without having a bank card it won't let you. You can receive, but sending requires you to add a CC.

Making things easier for foreigners in China simply have very low priority for these companies.

Both WeChat and Alipay are expanding aggressively abroad but their primary motive is just to make things easier for Chinese tourists traveling abroad.

I ran into this myself on a two week trip to China. They really should have something like the allowance of a 1000RMB balance on WeChat without a bank account for visitors.

We had a 72 hour layover visa en route to another country, stayed in Shanghai, paid for everything with normal credit cards, no problems. WeChat is only one option, but credit cards are another for foreign travelers. We mostly only did shopping at restaurants, hotels and larger grocery stores, but I suspect that is what most tourists do. We had $100 USD in local currency as a backup but never used it. This quarter we traveled internationally for 9 days to central america, took out $70 USD in local currency, paid for everything with credit cards except one tank of gas which was about $36. I don't see retailers dropping credit card payment options in the short term.

For the most part you won't have a problem with credit cards in very touristy areas. Once you leave the bubble, however, the acceptance rate for credit cards in China drops very quickly.

Yeah I was amazed at how easy it was to do all this stuff provided you had a way to get money in your account. I had to constantly try to find people willing to take cash to send me credits. I even saw people on Fiver who would do this as a service. I never was able to get Uber to work with any of my 5 credit cards. Would have been awesome though!

I've also heard that getting many financial products (e.g. credit cards) in China is very difficult without citizenship, and Chinese citizenship is virtually impossible to acquire by naturalization.

Recently, they've started new laws and process for foreigners to get permanent residence (green cards), which would allow foreigners to do everything that citizens do, including even buying apartments. Not sure what the uptake is though, and the requirements are pretty strict.

They’ve been talking about green cards for foreigners for as long as I was there (2007), every year it will be different this time, every year it isn’t.

More to the point: green cards are so rare most Chinese institutions don’t know what to do with them. They don’t actually help that much beyond just getting into the country.

Buying an apartment is usually just subject to residency restrictions whether you are Chinese or a foreigner. Beijing requires that you’ve paid Beijing social security taxes for 5 years if you don’t have hukou, which equally applies to non-Beijing Chinese.

As a foreigner I have an alipay account and didn't need a Chinese back account.

I believe those days are long gone. I once opened an Alipay and WeChat account without bonding my bank card to it. Eventually, I couldn't use them unless I bonded my account.

“until you open a bank account and get a local phone number.”

You won’t be able to get a SIM card either unless you are a Chinese citizen(or have a citizen get one for you)

This is untrue. Foreigners can easily get a SIM card. Just walk into a China Unicom or China Mobile store, with your passport.

This is not true, you can get a Chinese number and SIM card with a passport in any of the big telecom operators stores

All large mobile providers have offerings targeted specifically at foreigners (e.g. https://www.mychinaunicom.com/) and getting a Chinese SIM is one of the first things to do for exchange students in China.

Maybe those are all registered on a random citizen's ID, but given the scale and visibility of that business, it seems unlikely that all of that is happening in violation of the registration requirements.

I got one using foreign passport. However in the first shop I tried I was told I need Chinese ID. In the 2nd shop there were no problems

Yep, It appears that I'm not 100% accurate.

Some China Mobile/Telecom chains, in general, will refuse to sell SIM cards to foreigners, even if you got a passport. China Unicom, however will sell them to you, if you got a passport. So the responses here are also not 100% accurate, if I'm being fair :)

You were pretty accurate!

Have a group of friends touring China right now. They tried for days to get a SIM card but finally gave up - nobody would sell one to them!

The only place they did not try was a vendor at the airport where they arrived. They judged that vendor would be overpriced so waited until they got into the city.

Yep. I feel the people who responded don't know the latest rules happening in China. Even a few months ago, it was pretty easy to get a SIM card in China. But they have tightened things up a bit.

I had zero trouble getting a SIM with China Mobile. I pre-paid $1/RMB per day plus a deposit in case I went over my daily usage. It took a bit of time that day because of language issues but I was fine.