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.
Alipay was easier to set up and ubiquitous. But same deal.
Nice! These days, wechat process is 1) link a card through the app and 2) done, start paying through wechat. What’s the Alipay process?
Pretty much exactly the same. But the Ali interface hosts several mini apps that auto links to the alipay payments. So you can book flights, hotels, trains, attraction tickets, or order a didi all from the main interface. Pretty slick, all without searching for related accounts.
Cool. They have all those little ticket/hotel mini apps in wechat too, i was using didi, ctrip, taobao, 火车（168？）through WeChat way back in the day when I had a Chinese bank account in Chengdu 9-10 years ago whenever they started.
You’ve been using alipay with a foreign linked card for a long time? If so alipay is definitely ahead of the curve on that.
Yeah, it’s been working with Apple Pay as an intermediary for a bit now. You can do the same with alipay too I believe. Just did a trip in Feb where it went great.
That is so wild that payment integration is finally happening, great to hear! Had a good trip?
About frickin time. Although will I still get those situations where a venders just randomly don’t accept my WeChat payment because I’m set up with a foreign card?
No, you should be fine. as long as your card is connected to wechat, transactions go through without a hitch because it’s just wechat balances interacting. It’s pretty great, subways, street vendors, mall stalls, restaurants and supermarkets have been no problem for me so far.
That’s my point though, many times in China I’ve been unable to enter my pin and been prompted to select a different card when using both WeChat and Alipay. I’ve never been able to work out what the exact reason is, but it’s almost certainly due to the type of vender. In those situations I’ve had to scan someone else’s personal wechat payment qr and transfer them some money so that they can pay for me.
And that’s another oddity about foreign cards. I cannot send a WeChat contact money via my contacts list, but I can send them money if I scan their personal payment qr code.
I’m hoping that the changes you describe eliminate all these annoying quirks. I’ll find out in September when I’m back
I know direct transfers are not allowed if the payment source is a foreign card but like you say you can scan the personal payment code and that works fine. I used that workaround too.
It’s only my second day using this function so I don’t know about the first problem yet. was it a particular size vendor or a particular category of vendor or kind of random when your payments wouldn’t go through?
Did your payments not go through your card or the balance itself when you switched sources?
I do have a few hundred kuai in the balance in case for whatever reason my card doesn’t work.
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 had a strange situation where I could scan and send but operators couldn’t set the amount via qr code and me scan to complete payment.
Left for a weird hands and feet no English conversation with taxi drivers and shop assistants.
This was on wechat.
Cool, thanks, was that recent? I’m also in Beijing, where I would expect everything to b e pretty smooth, and so far merchants can scan my code fine A ton of stores seem to have a new device i’m new to, a small little brick that autoscans your qr code so the clerk doesn’t have to do it.
This was in ShenZhen about 2 months ago. Didn’t have enough time time to debug, maybe next time. Was onto my master card
Okay, thanks, i was talking to a couple foreigners a couple hours ago, I’ll try to compare notes next time and see if anyone is still having those kinds of payment problems. maybe it’s a different city thing.
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Does WeChat still have the issue of randomly locking overseas accounts? I traveled there many years ago and lost contact with all the friends I made because WeChat decided my account was somehow suspicious after returning to the US. I needed someone else with an account to verify me, which I obviously couldn’t get.
I’ve seen people travel there more recently and they don’t seem to have any problems, but the app reviews indicate it still happens frequently.
I still have many original contacts with wechat friends from a// over, so my guess is that you got unlucky since I haven’t run across that problem myself. although I have had to do that friend-verification thing several times(new phones), which can be a pain but luckily i was able to recover my account.
I’m keeping my eyes open and will let you know if that problem comes up, but so far it’s smooth sailing.
I want to travel to China about as much as I want to travel to the US or Russia.
No worries, you’re not allowed to leave your country without permission from the military anyway.
That’s alright, nobody will force you to travel to those countries.
