go say hi to a billion and a half people and a 3-5000 year old civilization. China is almost entirely cashless and has been for several years now: you scan a QR code or the vendor scans your payment code, and money is deducted from your balance or Chinese bank account.
thing is, getting a chinese bank account/card is a huge pain in the butt, not technically difficult but time-consuming and functionally non-essential but insisted upon.
Now, you don’t need to waste your time. Connect your own no-fee credit card and pay through the national systems without any fees!
transportation, hotels, hostels, grocery stores, massages, basically everything in the country is now open to anyone with a credit card instead of requiring a Chinese bank account.
Wechat promoted this “overseas card function” for years but it didn’t work for the entire time I lived in China, and I still couldn’t connect my no-fee credit card last year when I visited.
Sometime in the last year, however, foreign credit cards have actually been integrated into the national payment systems. This is huge, especially since so many countries now have 10-day visa-free travel in china.
Now, you can connect a no-fee card to Weixin(wechat) and for the first time, don’t need a Chinese bank account, phone number or card to use your local card to pay for thins in China! This is a pretty big payment revolution for travelers interested in visiting China and traveling around without undue hassle.
Every vendor has a qr code on the wall or a little scanner, so you look for the wechat or alipay symbol, scan the qr code or they scan your qr code and, done.
important notes(official regs):
Sign up with a passport and no-fee debit or credit card. You can sign up with any card, but if you have tx fees then the charges will rack up way too fast to be of any use.
No minimum transaction amount - i bought a single beer yesterday for 83 cents
No transaction fees under 200 RMB($26 USD equivalent) although you can pay multiple times, so if the bill is 340 RMB, you can pay 200 + 140 in two separate transactions.
Roughly $10000 USD yearly limit, which is more than enough to pay for a year of living in China, and way more than enough for a vacation.
It’s made this trip wayyy easier than before, where I was one of the very few cash-using people in the country because I didn’t want to deal with the time-suck of reactivating my Chinese bank account.
I’m going to go buy snacks and stuff.
It’s completely random. Sometimes is a street vendor sometimes it’s an actual store or restaurant. Though I will say I don’t think it’s ever happened in like a really big store. I think it’s almost certainly to do with the type of bank account linked to the vendors wechat/Alipay. In some cases when a vendor has had both a WeChat and an Alipay qr code, one worked while the other didn’t.
P.s. it’s not that the payment doesn’t go through, but that at the point you would enter the pin number, the keys are greyed out, and I am prompted to select or set up a different payment method
when you were prompted to select a method, did the payment not go through when you switched the source from card to balance?
Since the foreign card integration thing is so new, maybe you’re right and some vendors/transaction processes haven’t yet been integrated although the frontend is all wechat. especially if it was random for you.
when was your last trip here that the foreign cards were being rejected? I definitely used to have that greyed out keys thing back when my card didn’t work at all, like I could add it to wechat but I couldn’t actually use it as a funding source at all.
definitely different this time around for me, i just got some duck, mango, beer and mushrooms, a jianbing from a guy on the street around the corner. i plan on using the card/wechat setup the whole time i’m here and will let you know if any pay difficulties arise.
If I had balance then the payment would go through. It was clearly the case that some vendors would not accept payment from foreign cards. I would say it was a 1 in 20 sort of occurrence.
Last time I was in China was August so not that long ago.
I was wondering, were you only in Beijing, and when did you add that card? Was it a very straightforward addition, just passport and card? Because last year I added my card to wechat but it didn’t work anywhere, and the card-linking process this time was much easier. Couldn’t hurt to try removing your card now and then adding it again before you go next time. I’ve been to about fifteen vendors so far without a hitch, but I’ll keep at it. I’ll buy those snacks and beer in every corner of the city. For research.
I spent seven months in China last year and I was all over the place. I only went to Beijing for a few days. The problem occurred everywhere, but as I said, it was only the odd vendor here and there. The problem was repeatable too. Always the same vendors.
Removing and readding cards due but fix the issue, not did using different foreign cards
Okay, your explanation sounds correct to me then. Well, give it a whirl next time you go, I’m just visiting friends for a week in Beijing but I’d be curious if an updated system works better for you. I imagine anyone not perfectly fitting in will eventually be cut out of the system.
Everything develops so fast here.
I agree. I love China so so much
Hey, I think I found it, it’s business vs personal accounts. All business accounts have been infrastructurally integrated with the new foreign card-linked payment systems, but personal wechat accounts have to opt-in or they cannot receive foreign-card transactions. So I can’t send money to some of my friends who haven’t opted in, but any of them who have traveled or linked a foreign card to their wechat have necessarily registered their wechat with the foreign-card system and can receive personal payments from my foreign-card using their qr code. I’m not sure if they need a foreign credit card, I don’t think they do, but that’s the crux of the edge cases you’ve encountered: non-integrated personal vs integrated business wechat accounts.
Those edge cases you’ve encountered likely occurred from businesses using personal wechat accounts rather than using a business account for their business transactions.
Wow, well done. Good detective work