back to article China pushes its payment platforms towards an international presence

China’s main payment systems, Alipay and WeChat Pay, eased access for foreign users on Friday, a day after Beijing issued new guidelines for its payment industry. Scan-to-pay platforms are ubiquitous in China and the biggest players - Alibaba’s Alipay and Tencent’s Weixin/WeChat – last year allowed users outside China to back …

  1. Tron Silver badge

    Washington banning it in 10, 9, 8 ...

    quote: It also stressed the need for businesses to accept cash.

    Good. Wish our government would.

    It's helpful to be able to buy stuff directly from specialist Chinese suppliers, but tourism might not work so well. I dread to think how many ordinary, harmless things you can get arrested for doing, saying or photographing in a dictatorship.

    1. Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

      Re: Washington banning it in 10, 9, 8 ...

      The problem with even business visits is that you can't spend ANYTHING, even Starbucks only accept local online payments.

      So you are forced to have your local fixer/contact meet you at the airport and pay for everything - or the hotel send a car and you eat all your meals in the hotel and then pay the hotel with a credit card

  2. dadbot5000

    Share my foreign credit card or debit card info with the CCP? No thanks. Maybe if China would play nice with the rest of the world and allow ApplePay or other forms of electronic payment it would grease the skids of their economy.

    1. DS999 Silver badge

      So use a card that lets you create virtual card numbers, and use that for your visit, and cancel that virtual number when you get home.

      Do retailers in China no longer take cash, is electronic payment the only way? If so I assume foreigners have been using foreign credit cards directly rather than through Alipay etc.? Or do a lot of retailers accept ONLY the home grown payment solutions? I agree that's a problem for people visiting China, but foreign tourism is hardly a big portion of their economy so they probably don't care too much.

      I don't remember the exact figure but I read recently that something like 93 or 97% of China's tourism business was domestic, or from other Chinese speaking places like Hong Kong. They aren't gonna be too worried about supporting US or EU tourism, especially with all the rhetoric between the countries probably encouraging most western tourists to go somewhere else.

      1. katrinab Silver badge
        Black Helicopters

        Most retailers in the UK no longer accept cash. Apple Pay and Google Pay are the normal way to pay for things. I guess it is the same in China?

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Well I couldn't get it to work

    I can't even comment on livestreams on WeChat because it won't accept my UK debit card as proof of identification.

  4. MrTuK

    This is China's way of getting foreign cash !

    This should be blocked by the West especially Visa/Mastercard etc because China never follows international rules and norms. Just look at the South China Sea, it will only follow until it decides nope, now you do what they want from now on. Any idiot that can't see that needs to go back to being a Neanderthal !

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