[carmen_sandiego]

China has decoupled a lot more since then. If you visit now I would say paying for things smacks you in the face way before access to Google services does. Recently they've enabled foreign cards so you can pay for stuff in stores with WeChat but it's still something you need to set up. The uninitiated just come and assume they'll use Visa/MC.

[seanmcdirmid]

I've never been able to use Chinese pay services even when living in China. It used to require a Chinese ID card, which you don't get unless you are a Chinese citizen with hukou.

My wife has wechat/pay, so it won't be a big deal when we go back. Starbucks will take foreign credit cards (or at least they did?), you could suffer at McDonalds though. I wonder if the xiaochi's still take cash?

[carmen_sandiego]

You can open a bank account in China without any real requirements and thus have a 'local' card. You just need a passport, phone number, and a local address (a friend's is fine).

And yes I think long long ago the WeChat setup would expect a Chinese ID number, but for at least some years now they've accepted passports as an alternative.

But very recently (in the last six months) they've started allowing foreign cards for WeChat pay. So you can add a card and pay for things in store, but not access the more general money transfers, red packets, etc. that people do with it. I guess those have stricter KYC requirements, plus they are keen to stop money getting out of the country.

Smaller places I never _see_ take cash, always WeChat, but I suppose that doesn't strictly mean they won't take it.

[seanmcdirmid]

You needed a working visa/resident permit last time I opened up a bank account in China (but that was in 2007, a bit long time ago). Linking to a foreign card to WeChat/AliPay would be really convenient, like how I was able to link ApplePay to Suica when I was in Japan (super convenient, but I had to top off manually on my phone, which was a bit annoying).

I'm really wondering how the hole in the wall xiaochis (e.g. 成都小吃, this is mostly a Beijing thing) work now. I'm guessing they would be the first ones not to take cash anymore if they didn't have to.

[carmen_sandiego]

Nobody asked me for a visa in 2015, and I was on a tourist one at the time so it can't even be some unified database thing they were using. A nice thing about Chinese banks is they can just hand you the card over the counter as well. That would never happen where I'm from in Europe-you have to wait for it to get mailed out to you.

Then again, I often find in China that workers/officials/whatever make up the rules on the spot, depending on what they know how to do, or what they consider too mafan. So maybe some will just 'feel' like you need a visa and others won't.

I get a similar thing in hotels where they can't be bothered to register my passport with the PSB, because they don't get many foreign visitors and so e.g. the computer to do it is not turned on. So they just don't do it.

I would guess you could get a hole in the wall to take cash most of the time, I just never see it done. One problem with cash in China is that the largest note has a pretty low value given how inflation is going and how costs are in tier one cities. Chinese people seem to think this is some kind of image management thing, where if they issue a larger denomination everyone will start freaking out about inflation. But I guess it's moot given how cash is losing favor anyway.

[seanmcdirmid]

I can imagine it differs between cities. Like Beijing should be the toughest for almost anything, however, while Shanghai is much easier...you don't have to go to the PSB to get your residency permit renewed after every foreign trip, for example.

My landlord used to make me pay my rent in cash, and we have to pay three months at a time. So I would withdraw 18,000 RMB from an ATM to take to my landlord. Thankfully, there are a couple of ATMs in Beijing that let you withdraw up to 10,000 RMB at a time, because when I had to use a normal one, everyone behind me in line was pretty angry. Then I would put it into my man purse, which was really fashionable in the 00s, because cash was king and you needed a lot of 100 RMB bills to buy things.

[carmen_sandiego]

I think China changes so fast that these fun personal touchstones come and go so quickly. I remember when I was first there you couldn't walk very far without hearing 'fapiao! fapiao!' from people selling them, so there must have been a fair bit of gaming cash-based payments, either for tax or company expenses purposes. Nowadays in Shenzhen I don't see that.

I used to adhere pretty strictly to the rules. Like I'd go register at the PSB as I moved around, all that stuff. At the time I figured, well, it's China, maybe they have some centralized place they're recording all this and they'll approve my next visa faster. But I've met other foreigners who just do not care about any of that, never register, and they get much better visa offers than I do. It's just a huge chaotic machine really.

You can talk to one official who'll tell you it's literally impossible to do X, where X is some thing that massively impacts your life there. Go to a different office or speak to a different person and oh yeah, you want to do X, no problem, and it's done in five minutes.

That drives some people crazy but I recommend anyone to experience China at least once in their lifetime. It's a very perspective-changing place.

[idlewords]

You can now use Alipay tied to a US debit card. I did it last month and it works fine; the biggest obstacle is your US bank may get jittery and require a couple of phone calls to unblock the debit card. Setting the whole thing up takes less than five minutes.