Cash is no longer king in China. Much like Sweden, the country’s young and old opt for digital payments, made possible by an app called ‘WeChat’. While sometimes compared to WhatsApp or Facebook, WeChat is much more. On the latest episode of Chinese Whispers, my fortnightly podcast, China tech expert Duncan Clark describes how it’s designed to be ‘a digital Swiss army knife’. As well as payments for everything from rent to groceries, the app’s ubiquity means that the Chinese now ask for each other’s ‘WeChat IDs’ instead of phone numbers. It’s designed for technophobes with functions like voice messages – as Duncan points out, this is particularly helpful for less educated Chinese: ‘even the Chinese find Chinese characters hard’.
Because of its popularity inside China (with an estimated one billion monthly active users) and China’s Great Firewall (which bans Facebook, Twitter, and so on), it’s also the messaging app of choice for the millions of overseas Chinese.
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