[xbmcuser]

While these private companies exist and are in it for the profits, they don't control the government, meaning any potential price gouging is strictly regulated. The Chinese government actively prevents private companies from becoming too powerful or dominating an industry in the public eye. Instead, they foster competition by promoting and building up alternative companies.

A great example of this is how they handled digital payments. While Visa and Mastercard maintain a monopoly in the West, China faced a similar situation when private mobile payment systems began dominating the market. In response, the government stepped in and forced the ecosystem to open up to competitors.

[chbbbbbbbbj]

I wouldn't characterize it as forcing to "open up". It's true they put an end to some of the most egregious anti-competitive practices, but the Chinese tech ecosyatem, including payments, is still notoriously non-interoperable. For example, there's no way to transfer money between WeChat Pay and Alipay.

The relationship between Tencent/Bytedance/Alibaba is what happens when there are no monopoly laws or they are ineffective: every company fighting tooth and nail to corner every market with a single "super-app". No specialization at all and many races to the bottom, like the recent war between Alibaba, JD and Meituan over instant delivery that made every company involved lose a lot of money.

[handle584]

I don’t get the example, any payment in China is basically a duopoly between WeChat and Alipay, meanwhile in US there are visa, mastercard, American Express and discover counting credit card payment only.

[xbmcuser]

In the US, Visa and Mastercard control the backend infrastructure, giving them the power to decide who can use their services. This is why we see them blocking legal platforms or creators simply because a corporate board disagrees with what they are selling.

In China, this kind of corporate driven censorship doesn't happen. Tech corporations like WeChat and Alipay don't control the payment routing that is run by the state's central network. A merchant just needs a bank account and a QR code, and any customer can use it to pay them. The private apps cannot arbitrarily decide to block a legal merchant based on corporate politics or moral stances.

[handle584]

Exactly as the other comment pointed out, in China you would not run such a business to begin with, let alone to be blocked later by payment processors.

By legal platforms or creators I suppose you mean the dispute between card processors and platforms like steam, pixiv, dslite, etc about nsfw contents like anime child porn? Those stuff are already banned in China long time ago.

To give a real example of how China bans stuff, take ByteDance as an example. It used to run a joke sharing app roughly translates into Subtle Jokes that is on par with TikTok in terms of popularity. Then one day CCP decided it did not like it, then poof it's gone overnight. The founder issued a public apology and promised to almost double their censorship department in the future. Comparing to the TikTok case in the US, we got what? The funny-yet-pathetic legal tic-tac-toeing of Singaporean-not-Chinese nonsense. There is just fundamental difference in the scale and efficiency of censorship.

[f33d5173]

Instead, the government does it themselves based on regular politics and moral stances.

[sroussey]

But not open up to competitors like Visa.

[ceejayoz]

Credit card processors are, as a natural aspect of their purpose, a deeply useful surveillance network.

[handle584]

In the opposite direction unionpay works at major US retailers directly or at least through a partnership with discover, even Alipay is available at CVS, while us processors presence in China is next to zero.

[slaw]

Alipay is available only through Discover. Chinese processors have no presence in the US. In the same way in China you can use Visa and Mastercard through WeChat.

[handle584]

Source about alipay/discover partnership? I could not find any and it is hard to imagine how a card-based network can support a qrcode-based system. The acceptance of Alipay at CVS/Walgreens is native, meaning you pay by qrcodes, exactly what you do in China.

Major merchants in the US do support UnionPay, even USPS(!) displays its logo. The problem used to be small/local merchants, but with the advent of modern PoS like square/clover it is getting better.

In what same way? Even registering a Wechat account is no trivial task, just look at all those ppl asking help scanning their signup codes. Suppose you did KYC and seasoned the acct enough to get it finally working, it is still limited to business codes (think of bigbox stores), not personal codes (think of farmers market, local mom-and-pop place, etc). The latter actually dominates the daily life in China.

IMO using V/M through wechat/alipay is like in the world you described and I was arguing UnionPay works in the US because ppl can buy gift cards at PO then use them at merchants, which is actually smoother comparing to this w/a business, but at the same time quite ridiculous.

[slaw]

alipay uses first data

unionpay uses pulse

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Data

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulse_(interbank_network)

[cwillu]

Correct. A level playing field for all companies regardless of other factors is explicitly a non-goal.