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Comment by ngokevin | Hacker News Reader

Yup, they've set it up so money can flow within their own system and their own economy can prosper, rather than money feeding out to Google or Facebook. Quality of life in China has exploded massively, and things like restaurant prices are reaching American prices, which is insane going back ten years.

And they remix the ideas of western tech and often improve upon it. WeChat is orders of magnitude more convenient than what the US has to offer. Everything is centralized and integrated, what Google tries to do, but adopted everywhere. Book anything, pay for anything, tap phone to pay for anything. I don't expect many places to take phone payments. In China, most everywhere can take phone payments.

Their social networks also seem to do great at getting things naturally viral. I posted a random video without any boosting and it got like 1.5K views in a day.

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WeChat is orders of magnitude more convenient than what the US has to offer. Everything is centralized and integrated, what Google tries to do, but adopted everywhere

Fascism has it's good points!

Seriously though, WePay isn't innovation - we could have that right now in the West. Citibank could make an app that would allow peer-to-peer money transfers with QR codes the way WePay works. It would be smooth and easy. You'd just have to have a Citibank account. After a while, everyone could get an account with Citibank and it would be great! The other banks wouldn't like it, but whatevs.

Then Citibank would realize they were the gatekeepers of the digital peer-to-peer economy and they would seek rent. Transaction fees would increase. Monthly account fees would sky-rocket. Eventually, the govt would realize this was a drain on commerce and would seek to regulate and maybe even break up Citibank, but in a rule-OF-law nation, the govt would actually have to go to court and Citibank would get to argue their case against govt intervention. It could take YEARS! Look at how long it took the govt to prosecute IBM back in the day!

Meanwhile, if Tencent gets too greedy with WePay, the govt just makes their CEO disappear. In fact, in a fascist state, having monopolies is an ADVANTAGE! It's one throat to throttle - if there's a problem, there's just one CEO you need to kill.

WePay isn't innovative - it's just something that works particularly well in a fascist state. Getting the whole banking industry to agree to communicate and cooperate on a common mobile payment system is a bit more difficult...

Update - s/rule-by-law/rule-OF-law/

The US is is a rule-OF-law country, China is rule-BY-law. The difference is that in rule-OF-law, the government is subject to the law. In rule-BY-law, the law is the tool the government uses to rule (dominate), that is, rule by means of law. It may sound nitpicky, but it’s a rather big difference.

It's not nit-picking - that's very interesting. Thanks for the correction.

I would just like to say that contactless chip cards are ubiquitous, do not require a battery, are more secure (no reliance on QR codes) and have been around for years in the West.

It isn't the same thing by any means, and doesn't really offer much over cards other than a slight improvement in convenience. Mobile payments in China are essentially peer-to-peer and universal. The closest equivalent is probably something like MobilePay or Swish, but that isn't as good or as widespread.

Peer-to-peer in the same way that PayPal is peer-to-peer. There's still a central entity somewhere holding all the money and data.

Sure, but cards are even more centralized.

The "feature" of WeChat is that it can be used for almost anything. It is a cash successor more so that a card alternative. Anyone can print, display or scan a QR code. Doesn't matter if it is a store, a friend or a random person. Doesn't matter if it is in the physical world, on a website or in a chat. And it is easy to do. And almost everyone uses it.

Contactless cards only matches WeChat in the same way something like Apple Pay does.

I am not seeing the value in being able to print QR codes unless your business is selling fruit on the street (to be fair, a lot of businesses in China are just this).

The more secure analogy comparable in price would be solutions like Square and PayPal Here. Smartphones are ubiquitous.

My contactless card works nowhere outside my small home country. Meanwhile Chinese tourists are there seamlessly buying food from 7/11 with alipay whole I go through the full pin and card thing.

As the other reply says too, any shop can set this up easily. I challenge you to take contactless payments in your home country, it's nothing like simply getting a qr payment and involves merchant banking.

I've seen tiny remote rural village stores that would never even imagine having a visa PoS terminal with big wechat payment signs out front.

I've used contactless Visa to buy things in Japan, Singapore and several other places. It's a UK card though so maybe there's something different going on there

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