How QR conquered China
From a hole-in-the-wall deli to Shanghainese fine dining, your Renminbi bills are no good in China unless they are sent via Tencent’s QR scan. With this seemingly modest technology, China is said to be at the frontier of the world’s trend toward a cashless society.
The Chinese equivalent of WhatsApp, WeChat, serves as the site where people spend most of their online time and thereby the centerpiece of the cashless-ecosystem. Containing all shopping experiences within the WeChat platform, Tencent boasts the quasi-monopoly of the online payment market.¹ It is no secret that Tencent’s achievements are partly thanks to the strong guanxi it enjoys with policymakers, the networking based on the introduction of confidants.² Tencent perhaps is the first online platform to sell baby formula and let you pay taxes.
Although some American pundits warn against the danger of high degree of centralization as the case of WeChat is, technocrats of Silicon Valley are first to admit the potential of this centralization.³ It is said that the reign of credit cards in China is short due to China’s late arrival to prosperity. The void is serendipitously filled by the hegemony of online payment and a cashless society.
¹ Wang, Yuhua. “How WeChat Grows into a Huge Part of Our Life.” USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, DSM NEWS, Sept. 3AD, 2017, annenberg.usc.edu/communication/digital-social-media-ms/dsm-today/how-wechat-grows-huge-part-our-life.
² “LinkedIn, Others Face Challenges against China ‘Guanxi’.” South China Morning Post, South China Morning Post, 28 Aug. 2013, www.scmp.com/news/china/article/1157651/linkedin-others-face-challenges-against-china-guanxi.
³ “WeChat’s World.” The Economist, The Economist Newspaper, 6 Aug. 2016, www.economist.com/business/2016/08/06/wechats-world.
