Welcome to China. You Probably Can't Buy Anything, Though
morningstar.com
morningstar.com
AliPay and WeChat recently signed agreements to facilitate foreign card support.
AliPay (as of one week ago) has full payment functionality for foreigners, called "TourPass" [0]
Download the app, and click on the 'TourPass' icon (blue suitcase in the top left). You can now add credit via a foreign credit card.
Inside the TourPass sub-app, you have two options: Scan to Pay (you scan a code and input how much to pay - peer to peer purchases and small restaurants), and Payment QR Code (your code gets scanned, and account debited - transport, etc)
You can transfer money to individuals and receive money as well.
I confirmed this as of last week in China - and was able to make all purchases (taxi, train, food, supermarket, goods, peer to peer) without any problem.
[0] https://rapidtravelchai.boardingarea.com/alipay-tour-pass/
Tencent last week announced a pilot program to open up WeChat Pay to foreigners. UnTour's Mr. Long, an American, was initially excited about the program. As of Friday, he'd had no success making his Visa or Mastercard work.
Tencent, which called lack of access to mobile payments a "major pain point" for foreigners, said the rollout is initially limited to certain situations, such as booking train tickets on a travel site.
The site is only available in Chinese.
Travelers have had more luck on Alipay, which introduced a seven-step process last week that requires visitors to submit passport and visa information to Alipay, before loading money using an overseas card onto a prepaid card.
Select amount, add payment method, photo of passport, done.
Immediately after opening the app, it gave me the security prompt to access all my files. Obviously I denied it, and got the following Chinese error message: https://i.imgur.com/W6jJoDL.png
Unsurprisingly, it was because I denied access to my files, but wasn't exactly the most user friendly introduction.
After granting access, it didn't understand my mobile phone number format so I had to type it in an atypical way to get the sign up code. Once after getting through, the search function/bar (I assume?) is still in Chinese along with various other parts of the app.
These are not unsurmountable issues - but it's still not there yet.
Don't take my word as the gospel truth, but it seems like Samsung Knox can sandbox such an app.
Or maybe Shelter https://www.xda-developers.com/shelter-open-source-sandboxin...
If you've not been to China and experienced life without payments, the above might seem like too much effort or anti patterns, which is all true.
How about cash?
> First it was a shopkeeper at the Great Wall who wouldn't take cash for a bottle of water.
> "Ten years ago it was cash for everything. Now it's WeChat for everything," Ms. Sjogren said. "I'm getting used to being a dinosaur in China."
> Foreigners aren't the only ones bewildered by China's fast transition to a cashless society. "I can't even eat!" said Gong Cheng, a 61-year-old retired Shenzhen auto mechanic, who has resorted to asking strangers to pay for his takeout noodles and then giving them money.
> A few weeks later, Mr. Copley, 25, was stranded outside a bar at 4 a.m. He finally begged a Chinese couple to call him a taxi on a local ride-hailing app and repaid them in cash for the fare.
See how difficult it is? Perhaps in rural areas, it is easier. But in the cities, everyone has a phone. And, everyone needs WeChat.
Lives in a city and doesn't seem to have a phone; at least he doesn't have access to mobile payments. Note that what he can't pay for with cash are takeout noodles, the kind you order online. I bet he pays cash for everything else.
Even in the cities, not everyone has a phone, simply because not everyone can afford one. The less pricey something is, the more likely you'll be able to pay with cash.
Still have to rely on cash and credit card, or set up a Chinese bank account and get the Chinese version of Alipay/WeChat Pay.
Ofcourse, everything is linked the moment you get a SIM Card with your photo/passport. This isn't that surprising, most countries have policies to check ID before handing you a SIM Card. OTPs are then generated against that phone and then the entire ecosystem is tracking you. Your entire life is in WeChat.
Fuck everything about that. I'll take hard, cold, paper cash anyday.
There are a lot of powerful ways that could be used. Both good and bad.
I am happy to forgo conveniences for privacy and freedom. But those two concepts do not exist in China.
The US is getting there. Starting October 1, 2020, "RealID", or a higher level ID like a passport or Global Entry card, will be required for US domestic air travel. And entry to Federal buildings, military bases, etc. As yet, it's not required for employment.
Hmm... last I checked, I can protest, sue the government, flip a bird to the president and question authorities when they pull me over for a probable cause, go to court, have a fair trail, escalate to supreme court, all while being able to have the right to vote politicians out, hold free press and have the freedom of speech.
I am not saying that there aren't issues in the US, and we should fearlessly debate, take action and challenge. Organizations such as EFF are doing that. But let's not compare this with China to smear out the massive surveillance program China has going for them. Please keep these issues separate. It is frustrating to be able to not criticize the Chinese government as people bring up issues about US government. Foo is bad, but look at Bar and Baz - they are doing bad things too. So, Foo is justified?
In general, digitization is worrying for every nation because it may have benevolent cause today, but information doesn't rot and it will bite us decades into the future if not today. In US, in EU, in Africa, in Asia, in the world.
In China you can’t share memes that compare Xi Jinping to Winnie the Pooh.
As long as that stays true America isn’t there yet and there is hope.
Growing fascist tendencies in the US are a concern, but there is no question you have more freedoms in the US.
I was aware that most things are now paid with QR codes when I came here a few months ago, so I brought enough cash with me just in case things go wrong (and they did), but not once did I have to ask someone to pay for me in the first two months that they refused to open a bank account for me.
I've taken friends out to popular, touristy places and restaurants when they visited, and have never encountered a taxi driver who doesn't have cash (the part about hailing a taxi at weird times in the morning is, as far as I can tell, true though).
The only real issue was that I felt like people were staring at me like they have spotted a supposedly-extinct animal whenever I paid with cash. :(
Went a couple of years ago and used Google Fi network when traveling. Was still able to access several services like maps, Yelp etc, but the info was pretty minimal.
At least in Shanghai and Beijing, never experienced any issues as long as I had cash or card available. It’s anecdotal, but I promise you can still travel there. It’s unfortunate if articles like these convince you otherwise.
p.s. Don’t get drinks/coffee/tea with Chinese English speakers unless you know them. In the big cities it’s almost always a scam if someone walks up to you and speaks good English. Edit: If a stranger suggests a place to hang out at, suggest a different place. That is a good test to see if you are about to get scammed. Many scammers have a particular shop they collude with.
It’s good to know that their system is controlled in a way like that, but the only note of value in this article is that one person's repeat visits show that it’s more proprietary than years before.
Not really, Alipay is available in more and more countries and online as well. It's really easy to pay with it internationally unlike the other way
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alipay#International_expansion
I'm glad it's getting easier for foreigners to get more connected to the payments ecosystem. Makes for a much nicer experience.
I travel to Harbin, a major Chinese city in the northeast Heilongjiang about once a year. My group always consists of member of my host country that is at least marginally conversational in Mandarin (this on the menu please, going to this area, Mr. Cab Driver), and a native or someone with Native level fluency (There must be a misunderstanding, I promise we didn't intend to trespass). Our group leader usually exchanges a few days worth of meals in cash at the hotel before we leave for the day, but instead of paying for meals, we just slide our native friend the cash while he/ she scans their WeChat/Alipay app.
This past trip I decided to go rouge and just use my credit cards (unrelated: most of my credit card providers simply don't have an option to notify them of international travel "Their sophisticated algorithm detects when you're traveling"). Most places in the US let you know what digital payment forms they accept. Almost always Visa/Mastercard, Usually Amex/Discover, rarely ApplePay/SamsungPay/Google Pay, and - in tourist areas on the west coast and in Hawaii in my experience - UnionPay (China credit card) or JCB (Japan credit card).
I expected something similar over in China. Nope - WeChat Pay, Alipay/ Union Pay or Yuan. Not in Kansas any more.
I managed to install and link my credit card up to both the Alipay/ and WeChat iOS apps, but they declined my purchase at the counter. Not sure why the app would "accept" my CC info without doing a test transaction. It turns out you need a Chinese CC to use the Chinese payment apps, which requires a Chinese bank account. I'm sure you can easily get one if you have a Visa, but for some reason we never thought it out that far.
Those same cards that were declined tested satisfactory for a ~20USD at a Starbucks the same day. I tried a 40USD gift card purchase right after that and was declined. Our native friend covered me.
tl;dr first stop when visiting China should be a bank. you'll get an account, which will give you a card, which you can use for China's increasingly required digital payment systems
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/11/16/world/asia/ch... / https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21552873
Welcome to HN, where that can get 40 points and yet not be found among the first hundreds of stories. Poof, gone like that, but not even a [flagged] tag. At this point, there's even CCP officials who are less committed than HN is: They leak stuff, you can't even discuss it.
https://twitter.com/austinramzy/status/1195688077731061760
> The material was brought to light by a member of the Chinese political establishment who requested anonymity and expressed hope that the disclosure would prevent party leaders, including Xi Jinping, from escaping culpability for the mass detentions. There are nearly 200 pages of speeches by Xi Jinping, XJ party secretary Chen Quanguo and security boss Zhu Hailun. There’s another 150+ pages of directives and orders on controlling the Muslim population. I’ve reported on China since 2003, and can’t recall a leak like this.
> It is stunning to hear party leaders in their own words ordering a drastic crackdown on extremism, including mass detentions, and the cold calculations with which they weigh the consequences. Chen redistributes Xi’s speeches after he goes to Xinjiang in 2016, and calls for a “smashing, obliterating offensive” and issues a vague order to “round up everyone who should be rounded up”. But perhaps the most telling document is a guide for officials to explain the camps to children of detainees. It is full of veiled threats, pseudomedical language of psychological infection and assurances the party will take care of you.
I didn’t realize this all started because of terrorist attacks,
> In 2014, little more than a year after becoming president, he spent four days in the region, and on the last day of the trip, two Uighur militants staged a suicide bombing outside a train station in Urumqi that injured nearly 80 people, one fatally.
> Weeks earlier, militants with knives had gone on a rampage at another railway station, in southwest China, killing 31 people and injuring more than 140. And less than a month after Mr. Xi’s visit, assailants tossed explosives into a vegetable market in Urumqi, wounding 94 people and killing at least 39.
> Against this backdrop of bloodshed, Mr. Xi delivered a series of secret speeches setting the hard-line course that culminated in the security offensive now underway in Xinjiang. While state media have alluded to these speeches, none were made public.
Xi’s speech was enlightening too,
> In several surprising passages, given the crackdown that followed, Mr. Xi also told officials to not discriminate against Uighurs and to respect their right to worship. He warned against overreacting to natural friction between Uighurs and Han Chinese, the nation’s dominant ethnic group, and rejected proposals to try to eliminate Islam entirely in China.
> “In light of separatist and terrorist forces under the banner of Islam, some people have argued that Islam should be restricted or even eradicated,” he said during the Beijing conference. He called that view “biased, even wrong.” “We say that development is the top priority and the basis for achieving lasting security, and that’s right,” Mr. Xi said. “But it would be wrong to believe that with development every problem solves itself.”
> “In recent years, Xinjiang has grown very quickly and the standard of living has consistently risen, but even so ethnic separatism and terrorist violence have still been on the rise,” he said. “This goes to show that economic development does not automatically bring lasting order and security.”
Great article, this gives me a much better picture of what’s happening and how it started.