To Cover China, There’s No Substitute for WeChat

If you&#x27;re a foreigner, getting a functioning WeChat account is near to impossible these days. Validating a foreign account involves sponsorship from a local account. Local accounts can only sponsor one user every three months.<p>This is a policy that has been getting steadily more and more restrictive. I have partners who simply give westerners a telephone with a new account + Sim loaded and bound to a local to avoid hassles.<p>Life in China today without WeChat is a bit like life in the USA today but communicating only by postal mail and paying for things with traveller&#x27;s cheques. It&#x27;s possible, but it&#x27;s not a world you want to live in.<p>If WeChat is taking over the world.. it&#x27;s a world without foreigners.

The combination of Wechat and making it effectively the only option through the Great Firewall is an amazing tool for shutting out foreign voices from Chinese social media. The apparent policy on connecting to Wechat from outside the mainland is &quot;don&#x27;t&quot;.<p>It seems incredible that people would want to use such a restrictive service when much more open ones exist, but the others routinely have their service degraded by the government so they aren&#x27;t a viable option.<p>Personally, it think in the long term this sort of compartmentalization is harmful, it too often facilitates groupthink and missing valuable input from people with a different perspective. It&#x27;s damaging to a society and is going to have repercussions.

God forbid if I want to quit WeChat. The shit I get from my wife and relatives if I don&#x27;t post anything, reply to something they posted or give them &quot;red pockets&quot; is absolutely ridiculous! It is probably the most successful social network app&#x2F;money transfer app out there... and I don&#x27;t like it. Maybe I&#x27;m turning into an old geezer or something...

My hope is that China demonstrates to the world how terribly this kind of digital-dystopia plays out, and serves as a cautionary tale for countries like England and companies like Google which are already (more slowly) heading in that direction.

I had to install WeChat once on my phone for business reasons. From what I read of the Chinese government&#x27;s control over it, I felt nervous that my phone was compromised by installing it.<p>You could say that Facebook is just as bad, but 1) I don&#x27;t install Facebook and 2) I still trust the US Government more than the Chinese one.

&gt; the messaging app that’s the equivalent of WhatsApp plus Facebook plus PayPal plus Uber plus GrubHub plus many other things.<p>It&#x27;s unfortunate not much of their architecture is publicly shared or discussed. With their massive amount of users and incredibly diverse service offerings I&#x27;d love to see their backend architecture design choices&#x2F;tradeoffs.

Reminds me of some earlier article about a chinese daughter who pursued a &quot;solitary life&quot;. With few chinese &quot;social connections&quot; it was tough for her to get things done for her aging father? mother?. That would seem to make for a strong driver for &quot;digital connections&quot; ala wechat.<p>Hate to break it to the author though: western companies aren&#x27;t going to be the ones doing the digital liberation. It&#x27;s not like that&#x27;s what their doing here anyway.

The WeChat MacOS client requires some ridiculous QR code dance to login <i>every time</i> I open it. That alone prevents me from using it over iMessage &#x2F; FB messenger when communicating with my family.<p>The only time I use WeChat is if family members are in China where I assume they have banned FB messenger and iMessage.

And then we have things like this, where in Canada, a Liberal Party candidate used WeChat to post a racist campaign message: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;globalnews.ca&#x2F;news&#x2F;4853439&#x2F;karen-wang-liberal-burnaby-south-candidate-wechat-message-controversy&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;globalnews.ca&#x2F;news&#x2F;4853439&#x2F;karen-wang-liberal-burnab...</a><p>How can any journalists learn about this story without a WeChat account or without having some insider (local Chinese person) who has access to a WeChat account?<p>Multiple Internets are <i>already</i> here, and we&#x27;ve got to work at bridging them all over again.

Serious question:<p>We bitch and moan in the US about NSA-Google-FB-Amazon etc spying on private conversations&#x2F;things we say outloud etc.<p>Why on <i></i><i>EARTH</i><i></i> would you want a Chinese WeChat account, assuming you had any privacy concerns in a country like the US?

Funny that this article shows up today right after a big update (I think within the last few days) where the most basic message notification broke. Yep, it literally doesn&#x27;t show any message notifications unless I manually open up the app. Kinda useless in this state. This is probably not affecting many people since I haven&#x27;t see anybody complain about it.

Kind of funny.<p>WeChat is more taking over the world before ByteDance&#x27;s phenomenal growth in the past 2 years.<p>Now to say it&#x27;s taking the world appears to show that the author has no idea what&#x27;s happening in China...

I was in China, in the moment of activating WeChat when I put my phone down on my RFID passport. WeChat was the app which asked for Android permission to read the RFID tag.<p>I ceased installation and removed the app.

Just installed in on android. 90mb for a chat app. Really wonder what&#x27;s inside. We have multiple apps with a whole lot more functionality. Never more than 20-30mb

There was a recent If Then episode that commented on how China’s declining demand of iPhones may be in part to how people there are agnostic to the hardware and more dependent on the software apps ran on the device (WeChat, Alipay, etc.).

WeChat utilitarian characteristics seem awesome, aside from it being a major commerce platform but I&#x27;ve heard of features that connect you to businesses, government, and other services that would be really helpful.

It&#x27;s interesting and a bit scary to see how the reporter from NYT rendering WeChat, a daily used app developed by a HK IPO-ed tech giant, into a scary, wretched, government-controlled monitoring tool for restricting personal freedom.<p>Tell me, how can a social media like Signal and WhatsApp win in a country of billon population without even a single one local office? Just because it&#x27;s encrypted? Come on!<p>How to say that? Either charlatan or simpleton.<p>Talk with some &quot;real&quot; Chinese ppl, guys, and learn about what is WeChat.

Does anyone here have a business presence on WeChat? If so, what has your experience been like?

Where by &quot;the world&quot; we of course mean &quot;mainland China&quot;<p>Edit: the title has been changed; it used to read &quot;WeChat is taking over the world&quot; or something

Article title is currently the slightly less hyperbolic: &quot;To Cover China, There’s No Substitute for WeChat&quot;