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Comment by sitharus | Hacker News Reader

I visited China 10 years ago, and the extend of cash use surprised me even then. Nobody trusts banks.

Coming from a country where I visit an ATM maybe half a dozen times a year and a bank branch even less it was quite a shock. Fortunately I can still count change pretty quickly.

The other interesting thing about Chinese currency is how light the coins are. They feel like they're made of plastic.

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>The other interesting thing about Chinese currency is how light the coins are. They feel like they're made of plastic.

This is only the really old designs (1950s), also really small coins. 0.01 and 0.05 RMB coins are cheap and flimsy aluminum or something (? dunno exactly what metal). You almost never see those any more.

The newer 0.1, 0.5, and 1.0 coins are equivalent to US coins in sturdiness, some kind of brass or nickel or something.

Interesting. I picked them up in 2003, the 0.05RMB were the most obvious ones, the larger denominations were definitely more coin-like.

Yea, and you're seeing less and less of those now, especially in bigger cities where prices are getting crazy high. Also most stores are really good about keeping things in even 0.5/1 increments, instead of having everything be X.99 or X.95 (for the most part).

I went to the bank to pay a USD bill in RMB and they gave me 1 and 5 fens in my change. Mostly, I never see fen unless I go to the bigger grocery stores.

That would be fen (.01x). They are made of plastic as their value is so low. Mao (.10x) and Yuan (1x) are more like real coins, though mao's are smaller than yuan, and they have a plastic mao variant also, I believe.

Weird that a tightly controlled nation like China hasn't killed the fen yet.

China is not a tightly controlled nation. It is not democratic, but there is a lot of local diversity in how it is governed.

Fen probably wasn't eliminated due to inflation fears. For the same reason, they won't issue a bill larger than 100RMB even though it would be very useful.

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