While “cash or card?” is the usual question when standing at a cashier’s till in the west – in China the answer is neither.
“Visa and Mastercard won’t be able to change the payment culture that Chinese consumers have formed in the past decade. They have missed the golden era,” said Wang Pengbo, an analyst at Chinese internet consultancy Analysys. Mobile payment transactions reached a record 81 trillion yuan from January to October in 2017, according to figures from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. Users pay with money deposited in their Alipay and WeChat Pay wallets, or through the debit and credit cards they link to these mobile services.
“The cashless, cardless culture will continue to thrive in China. It’s impossible to return to a less convenient way to pay,” said Lei Ying, assistant professor at Guanghua School of Management of Peking University.