QR Everything
In China, you can easily go for a month with just $10 cash in your pocket. Two companies, Alipay and Wechat, connect to your bank account and allow you to pay instantly by phone. At fancier places (nicer restaurants and stores–the cutoff seems to be if you have AC) they use a scanner once you pull up your personal QR code on your phone. At fruit stands, convenience stores, barbershops, butchers and even beggars, your scan the QR code they’ve printed on a piece of paper and input how much you have to pay.
Here’s a decent overview of the history and business dynamics.
Some applications are ingenious. At the top of a mountain, I saw that the coin-operated tourist binoculars could be unlocked by Wechat. Now no-one has to lug coins down a mountain anymore! There’s also this lottery ‘Red Packet’ feature where you can send random amounts of cash to everyone in a chat room. A friend of mine at a VC firm said that a partner started sending out five of them to a twenty person analyst chatroom (only the first five to click get them) after lunch to wake folks up when they’re sleepy.
Paying for stuff online is where the streamlining makes a real difference. The hassle of taking your credit card out of your wallet and typing 16 numbers on your phone may not get in the way of a $20 purchase but does change the equation on smaller ones. For instance, tipping is much easier when all you have to do to authenticate is the two seconds it takes to have the app read your thumbprint. When I downloaded a free typeface for the ChinaEconTalk logo, I threw the creator a few bucks without even thinking. Further, unlike on the Apple Store (or Patreon and Kickstarter) Wechat doesn’t take a percentage of these tips. Patreon is great and all, but if the US had seamless online tipping for content creators on Youtube and Spotify there would be a ton more artists able to support themselves. Fundraising and journalism would also benefit dramatically.
That said, buying stuff in person via QR code doesn’t feel all that different. Aside from cash-only restaurants and bars in the states, you can get by with a credit card pretty much everywhere. Scanning a Visa doesn’t take any longer than Wechat, and I could’ve paid my friends or badminton coach with Venmo just as easily in the states.
And I still like using cash. My muscle memory still has me reaching for my wallet to pay for something even if I end up using my phone. For a cheap item, it’s faster getting a small note out from your pocket. Also, before my Mandarin good enough to always understand what number the store owner was saying, just handing over a larger bill gave me some breathing room.
More importantly, whipping out your phone every time you buy something makes picking up some fruit or an ice cream bar less personal. Instead of handing someone money and getting an item and change in return, by holding up your phone you’re creating a physical barrier. Instead of making this fleeting connection, you’re looking at your newest notifications. The people who sell you stuff are some of the very few strangers you interact with, and the more they’re intermediated by technology, the less connected to the real world you feel. So, I’m not wishing for an entirely cashless economy anytime soon.
HK Weekend
Since I’m still on a 60-day tourist visa, I had to leave the country to refresh the countdown. I took a $20 three hour-long bullet train to Hong Kong. It was a zoo: in my cabin was an entire extended family that let their kids scream the whole time. But the view wasn’t bad.
I thought I was immune to claustrophobia until I booked a seven story walkup $10/night Airbnb smaller than a prison cell. The owner had hung on the wall some quotes from Viktor Frankl.
I have a shirt that says “Human Against Trump” but haven’t once been approached about it in Guilin. My guess is that Chinese people don’t generally start political conversations on the street, but also Trump is more associated with his characters 特朗普 (Te Lang Pu) than ‘Trump.’ For example, it took a month of sitting in the same room with my teacher wearing my “Yale Club Tennis” shirts for her to put two and two together that “Yale” was 耶鲁(Yelu). So at 8am my first bleary morning I did not expect a big white dude to walk up to me and say “So you preferred Hillary, yeah? You know that she’s killed people?” At least later in the day a Starbucks barista complimented me on the slogan.
So how did Hong Kong feel? There was certainly a lot of home. I had a smoked salmon eggs benedict and watched Dunkirk (which hasn’t been released in China since August is “support domestic movies” month). Signs and menus are in English, and a few weird looks taught me that there are too many foreigners for the “white dude knowing nod” to be a thing. People on the subway scrolled through Facebook feeds, and I didn’t need to use a VPN on wifi. My ChinaMobile cell plan, however, still blocked sites in Hong Kong.
Hearing Cantonese and eating Canton food reminded me much more American Chinatowns than the rest of China. But learning Mandarin hasn’t helped me comprehend Cantonese, so I went from always understanding 25% of what was going around me to sometimes getting all and more often getting none of it.
I spent two days at an all-local music festival of mostly rock acts. The crowd had a number of families, and they saw fit to warn them not to let their kids poop wherever they wanted.
On the mainland, I haven’t seen young people dance anywhere (clubs don’t even have dance-floors–they are places you stand around tables with the friends you came with, order bottles, text and chain smoke). It was refreshing to see young Hong Kongers outside, bopping around, not caring about getting a tan.
After, I found some DIY hip hop place in the boonies that had amateur trap music. Someone asked me if I had any idea what they were saying. “Nope…” “Ha don’t worry I don’t either.”
