
The hottest app is a short video service, Douyin, which is called TikTok outside China. What are some hot new apps, tech products or internet services in China? Everybody - hotels, department stores, taxi drivers, noodle stands - takes Alipay or WeChat Pay or both. I’ve been carrying a 100-yuan ($15) bill in my wallet for months but haven’t found an occasion to use it. Mobile pay is now available in almost every place I visit in China, including small towns. Going to the banks, mostly giant state-owned enterprises, was torturously time-consuming. I used to have to go to the A.T.M.s all the time.
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Not many people had credit cards, and it wasn’t easy for small businesses to get approval to install the machines. When I moved from New York to Beijing in 2008, China was still a cash-based nation. Why are mobile wallets so popular in China? Many people in China’s internet industry work super-long hours to make sure they beat competitors to roll out new features first. Some commentators here say Facebook is almost a Chinese company because of its “move fast and break things” mantra. Generally, Chinese are more receptive to new things and more tolerant of imperfect products, including mobile apps. I don’t know how they manage so many contacts. A young venture capitalist told me that it had taken him only two years to reach the limit.

Many businesspeople I know have two or more WeChat accounts because WeChat allows only 5,000 contacts for one account. Because it’s a social media platform, you learn about your contacts as individuals beyond their business titles. At many meetings in China, there’s a time when everybody takes out his or her phone and scans the WeChat QR codes of others to become “friends.” I personally like having contacts on WeChat rather than on business cards. But people usually resort to WeChat for a quick response.īecause of WeChat’s prevalence, few Chinese carry business cards any more. Many Chinese never owned a laptop or a PC, and their first computer was their smartphone. The first thing many visitors to China notice is how mobile the Chinese are. How do people in China use tech differently, compared with people in the United States?

That’s where I found people to talk to for a column I wrote about the generation that grew up without Google, Facebook or Twitter. Before I got around to it, both became my WeChat friends.īut Weibo is still a good place to check out the hottest topics and trends.

Two years ago, I met two people who refused to use WeChat, and I thought about writing a story about how people like them navigated work and life. The prevalence has made WeChat an indispensable part of many people’s lives and work. Over one-third of them spend four hours or more on the app each day. Just about every Chinese online has at least one account, and some more than one. There are 800 million internet users in China, but over one billion WeChat accounts. That doesn’t include the two to three hours I use WeChat’s web version. As my iPhone battery use record shows, I spend about one-third of my daily nine-hour phone time on WeChat.
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It’s not an exaggeration to say I live in and work on WeChat, the messaging app that’s the equivalent of WhatsApp plus Facebook plus PayPal plus Uber plus GrubHub plus many other things. What tech tools do you rely on to do your job, and what do you like about them? How do New York Times journalists use technology in their jobs and in their personal lives? Li Yuan, a technology columnist in Hong Kong, discussed the tech she’s using.
