In China almost everything is WeChat/AliPay these days. People almost never use cash, even the street vendors use mobile payments.
It's a problem because if you do something that Tencent doesn't like, they can just shut you out of your life, quite literally.
And I'm not talking about politically sensitive stuff. At all. I'm talking about doing stuff that Tencent, the company, doesn't like.
I'm talking about e.g. if they detect you running WeChat in a virtual machine, they consider that against their ToS, and they might shut you out of your account, including payments, which means you lose the ability to buy breakfast, lunch, groceries, train/tickets, pay your electric bill, get a tax, pretty much everything. For fucking running a VM. Or decompiling it and writing a plugin to make it more usable/accessible for yourself. Or anything, really.
Tencent is honestly fucking AWFUL for doing this. This is fully their idiotic usage policy and has nothing to do with government compliance.
I wonder how this would impact tourism. Like, if I'm at the beginning stage of planning a trip and I'm choosing where I want to go then "weirdly requires setting up a payment app" is one of the criteria that puts a country quite far down my list.
It used to be worse than that, until only VERY recently you need a China bank account to set up WeChat payments, and you need a China +86 mobile number to set up a bank account.
Granted, if you are fluent in local language you can get a mobile number and bank account in less than an hour if you go first thing in the morning to beat the lines, but for tourists who do not speak Chinese it is basically damn near impossible to navigate setting all that up.
That said, international tourism isn't a big revenue generator, they care FAR more about the domestic tourism market, which is many times bigger. Foreign tourists are largely an afterthought.
Even now, domestic tourists can just tap their national ID card to board trains but tourists usually have to stand in line to buy paper tickets, or even if you get your bank account and all set up to buy tickets online, you'll still need to stand in line to print out the ticket because the electronic readers at train boarding gates don't support reading passports or foreign IDs of any sort.
> "weirdly requires setting up a payment app" is one of the criteria that puts a country quite far down my list.
Goes beyond that. The visa process is the most intense of any major country (if you have a high ranking passport). WeChat (the only way to communicate) requires you to be invited by someone else already in country. Street signs aren't in English, neither are any public transport aids. You can't communicate, can pay for things, can't find your way around (once you leave the cities no one speaks English). It was incredibly hard to travel there.
To be fair, almost nobody in the US speaks Chinese outside the major cities.
There is no reason English needs to be the "default" language of the world just because they colonized everyone.
If you travel somewhere and don't make an effort to learn some basic words of the local language, that's okay to do, but don't complain about how hard it is to get around.
> To be fair, almost nobody in the US speaks Chinese outside the major cities.
Does anyone have that as a realistic expectation?
> There is no reason English needs to be the "default" language of the world just because they colonized everyone.
Except English has a relatively small "native" footprint, not that many speak it as their mother tongue. There are many more secondary speakers of English than primary in the world. If the popularity of English was the result of colonialism, none of the above would apply.
> If you travel somewhere and don't make an effort to learn some basic words of the local language, that's okay to do, but don't complain about how hard it is to get around.
Are you implying that travelers to China (say with a Latin language as a base) should realistically try and learn basic Chinese for a weeks holiday? Do you have any idea how long that would take?
And I'm not talking about politically sensitive stuff. At all. I'm talking about doing stuff that Tencent, the company, doesn't like.
I'm talking about e.g. if they detect you running WeChat in a virtual machine, they consider that against their ToS, and they might shut you out of your account, including payments, which means you lose the ability to buy breakfast, lunch, groceries, train/tickets, pay your electric bill, get a tax, pretty much everything. For fucking running a VM. Or decompiling it and writing a plugin to make it more usable/accessible for yourself. Or anything, really.
Tencent is honestly fucking AWFUL for doing this. This is fully their idiotic usage policy and has nothing to do with government compliance.