"Pretty much every shop, restaurant and bar accepts WeChat and/or Alipay these days," said Yuhan Xu, a 30 year-old Shanghai-based radio researcher who has used her smartphone to pay for almost all her purchases since early 2016. "Even a small pancake stall does that," she added. "I don"t need to carry cash."
Many experts believe it won"t be long before China, the first country to introduce paper money, also becomes the first to phase it out to become fully cashless. But when will this moment come?
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Of China"s 1.35 billion population, 710 million are internet users. The results of a survey by the Beijing Youth Daily newspaper released in March found that, like Xu, 70 percent of internet users polled thought carrying cash was not necessary.
The apps fuelling this cashless trend are Tencent"s WeChat and Alibaba"s Alipay. Launched in 2011, WeChat is a multi-function app based around a messaging system that incorporates WhatsApp and Twitter-like elements. The app is phenomenally popular in China—the majority of WeChat"s roughly 889 million monthly-active users worldwide are based in the People"s Republic. Chinese users of apps like WeChat tend to not be put off by the personal data storing and sharing that goes on in them. Snooping by authorities is pretty much accepted.
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