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Comment by seanmcdirmid | Hacker News Reader

It actually still isn’t that bad. Keep in mind that China’s use of cash rate is still much higher than the USA, so people still take cash, and UnionPay, and so on...

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>China’s use of cash rate is still much higher than the USA

Is this regional, or perhaps urban vs rural? On my recent trip, I didn't see anyone using cash. Everyone used their phone. I bought coffee with cash at a Starbucks -- all the cash in their cash register was in a single roll held together with a rubber band. It was used so infrequently that they didn't use the trays or separate the bills.

Yeah my bet is definitely that rural is aggregated into that, if the stat is true. In the cities nobody uses paper money.

China is a huge country. The differences between a 1st tier city and a 3rd tier city are huge, and there are many kids 3rd tier cities than 1st. Also keep in mind that until recently, most transactions were cash, no checks and even bank transfers were hard. That means I used to have to bag around 20k RMB/3 months to pay rent, not fun since the biggest bill was the 100 kuai note (it got better later). Those famous shanghai man purses weren’t just for show (what if you had to buy a car)! The current mobile payment system is a huge improvement, but many people still have to use cash, especially the poorer and underbanked.

Anyways, think about how much cash you use in the states? I think I last withdrew cash 6 months ago? And I haven’t used all of that yet, since there is maybe one Asian bakery I know of that charges for using a CC. The USA was already way ahead of the game on non-cash payments (via checks and then cards) and that has only accelerated since (not as fast as china’s move to mobile payments, but starting from a much higher level). So ues, even if they aren’t using cash in big Chinese cities, they aren’t using it in USA cities either.

Since as a foreigner I was never able to use wechat pay myself (the rules kept changing, but when I tried early on they couldn’t do anything without my Chinese ID number), I used to have to use UnionPay and cash for all of my financial transactions. So that was the end of 2016 when I left, more than a couple of years, so I’m a bit out of date. When I moved back the states, I became cashless again (having been cashless before moving to China in Europe and the USA).

False.

Even the most faraway small villages residents use Alipay or WeChat, they don't even know what is a POS or ATM.

False. China has a cash propensity of 35%, the USA is at 11%. Those numbers are for 2018. China still falls behind all developed economies in the Asian region for non-cash transactions.

https://s3.amazonaws.com/fetch_production/assets/524432/The%...

False.

World Payments Report 2018 https://worldpaymentsreport.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2...

China ranks the third of non-cash transactions organization after Eurozone and USA, and with its rate of growing, China will become the #1 in 2021, aka 3 years later.

Actually, in 2016, WeChat alone has already reached 500M transition/day[1].

As for cash propensity, it has nothing to do with non-cash transactions. Chinese ppl just love keeping lots of money in their bank accounts.

[1] http://www.sohu.com/a/129980516_324659

Your source says that China ranks third after USA and Eurozone by total number of non-cash transactions. It does not imply anything about the share of non-cash among all transactions. Considering that China has more inhabitants than either of the other regions, the share of non-cash transactions should be quite low, or they wouldn't rank third.

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